by Peter Arnott
3.2.2
Moments later, outside, Frank and Joseph returned to Frank’s still intact Beamer, Frank uneasily conscious that it was Joe’s reputation that had protected it in a postcode where they can strip the wheels off a bourge-mobile in seventy seconds flat.
“What the fuck did ye dae that fer?” asked Joseph, referring to Frank’s earlier donation to Ronnie.
“He’s deprived,” said Frank as he opened up the driver’s door.
“I’m fuckin deprived” opined his brother without irony. Frank sighed as he buckled his seat belt. Everyone troubled him with their grievances. It was a cost of being himself he factored into his days.
3.2.2.1
With a scatter of gravel the visitors were gone, pink faces watching, pressed against mesh-covered windows. Macreesh stood at the threshold of Ronnie’s dorm room respectfully talking to a headless heap of farty blankets. “Tell me if anything happens, won’t ye, Ronnie,” he offered, as yet another of the lives he had touched slipped between his generous, decent fingers and fell a little further into the valley of the shadow.
3.3
Hell, despite the Frenchman, is not other people. It is ourselves as we are constituted, alone as we are, forcefully confronted every day with meanness. All objective enlightenment as to our singular and collective condition is the same thing as despair. As witness another of our wandering souls, Agnes MacHutcheon, who, though no longer in loco parentis of young Ronnie and his more capable older sister, and thus free of all extraneous responsibilities, was yet as afflicted as Sisyphus with the pointless stone-heaving of it all. At her advanced age, she had come no closer than her grandson to the Vedic acknowledgement of her own weakness and stupidity that might alone have saved her. She believed that people should be strong and wise and good, and, hence, finding herself wanting in all three of these admirable and illusory qualities, she struggled continually uphill into a thickening cloud of self-reproach, itself formed of a condensation of categorical imperatives, hefting a sack of moral burdens which she no more than the Pope could either raise to an acceptable height, nor yet slough off and let tumble down the hill again, despite their being, actually, on the level of ideas, a useless bag of rocks. Our not fitting into the world that we are forced to inhabit is not a soluble anomaly of social and philosophical origin and therefore capable of ameliorative thought or action. I am rather convinced as to the fatality of our evolved state. Perfection is not our possibility, therefore our faults are not faults exactly, rather features of our ineluctable incompleteness as creatures trapped in continuing evolution. Let me say a stoical “yes” to all there is, like your German man. That would be my song. But then, I’ve always gone pretty easy on myself, for all the good it ever did me.
3.3.1
Nothing was ever easy for Agnes any more. Not walking or breathing or seeing. Stubbornly independent, she refused all offers of health visitors or daily women, leave alone being sequestered in the tender care of one of Frank Wheen’s “care homes”. She had spent a month in one of them once after an operation, and had taken the presence of old people there as a personal insult. That was not for her. Rather, her path was a routine of rising and drinking, smoking and walking, once a day, to the Paki shop four hundred and thirty-seven increasingly painful and now nearly impossible steps up the slight but tyrannical incline round the corner and on to the main road. She didn’t observe anything on this, her only remaining perambulation on any day other than her own feet. She hated the television. She didn’t understand the radio. She had elementary crossword puzzle books piled by the hundred around the only three downstairs rooms of the house that she lived in any more, of which both the kitchen and downstairs lav were blackened nightmares, and the front room was so thick with dust that the mites had given up on excreting any more. But as long as her existence was cyclical and eventless, it was bearable. Even her slide towards death was tolerable in increments.
It took her an age to get to the shop each day — but, then, she had an age to get there. Mr Iqbal was always friendly and solicitous and she was always astonishingly rude in return. It took a longer age to get back, as she balanced two blue bags containing luncheon meat, Milanda and the milk and sometimes teabags and a new puzzle book (once a week) in a precise cantilever of minimum social entitlement. She’d not look up at sudden noises and occasional insults. She knew every crack in the pavements, and noted the growth patterns of the lichen therein with an approximation of interest. She walked on knives, her hips shrieking at her almost enjoyably. She wasn’t dead as long as it still hurt. As long as nothing interrupted her, as long as nothing in her life spoke to her of sequence, consequence or change, she could say she was okay if anybody were ever to ask her, which nobody ever would. She was rotting on her feet and made no complaint about it. Had she started complaining she’d not have been able to stop. She would have howled the last of her life away in protest. So she kept quiet. Today — Tuesday — was like every other day. Wednesday would be different. She’d be dead by Friday. Which only goes to show.
3.4
Returning now to Tommy Hunter on that Tuesday lunchtime, he was standing at the door of his hotel room, holding his breath without realising it, so that when he opened up to admit the tailor (see 2.4.1), he breathed out in a somewhat startling fashion. But then he was himself startled at what he saw. His first visitor in fourteen years looked to be made entirely of something like butter — round, a face of broken capillaries, balding, wisps of white hair transparent to his head, itself like an old tomato balancing on a brown suit, a white moustache just visible, a film on a blood-swollen upper lip.
“Mr Morton?” The sound came out without him moving his mouth, the chap! Tommy stared, and the flesh-enfolded eyes, perfect dots, fled from his own in a flicker to the suit bags draped over what must have been a limb at some ancestral evolutionary stage, and thence to the bags of pants and socks and shirts and shoes that dangled from the sinister paw.
“McIvor” came the voice from nowhere, brisk and comfortable. “Ross and Dean.”
He only seemed to speak in names, this fellow, and Tommy was still a number. So, he hesitated. The sphincter in the middle of the boobling fruit before him again widened disconcertingly.
“Gentleman’s outfitters for Mr Morton. We spoke on the phone this morning,” the mouth said, before once again regaining itself, pursed.
(In fact, Mr McIvor was anxious not to show his teeth, misshapen and discoloured as they were by years of pipe smoking and the later penitent sucking of Barley Sugars and Stripey Minty Balls. An extrusion of noise from an impossible source in any event.)
Tommy remembered then that he was in disguise as a human being and coughed “Aye” and let the stranger in.
And now Mr McIvor of Ross and Dean was all busy-ness, all bustle and chunter, rapid observations of the weather splicing into a bewildering commentary on local and national affairs as as a charcoal-grey suit was laid out and displayed with some pride on the bed, two boxes of shoes at the bedside, and the bag of shirts, socks and boxers equally well placed at the foot of it, too neat and quick for the eye to follow, talking too fast for the ear to hear, Tommy standing back the while in bleary amazement, only roused to wariness by the sight of this wee man suddenly standing still and seeming to protect himself with a white strip of plastic stretched across what must have been his chest, held lightly but firmly between the doughy lumps on the ends of what were, in fact, now he looked more closely, arms. The tailor had also stopped talking, having covered his available material in a matter of heartbeats.
What’s this?” Tommy asked him.
“It’s a measuring tape, sir. It is awfully dark in here.”
Tommy reached behind him for the desk lamp and could then make out the numbers on the tape. “What fur?” he asked, genuinely mystified. Mr McIvor chose to take this as a joke, expelling three short puffs of breath and spittle.
“Why to measure you, Mister Morton. My conscience, we can hardly have you buying two suits from us
without my confirming your measurements.”
“Naw,” said Tommy, in a rising flush of panic that uprooted his scalp, “yer aw right.”
“When was your last fitting, sir?” said McIvor, almost scolding in his emphasis, blind and wise in a very small universe.
Tommy felt sweat sting his eyes as he tried to remember ever having been there himself. “Nineteen … eighty something … I think …” he managed, the taste of vomit in his mouth.
He told himself he was going to have to get used to this. He overcame the dizziness by force of will.
“For heaven’s sake, Mr Morton …” McIvor tutted, italicising, and then, unbelievably, started towards Hunter, actually came near him, oblivious to the surely proverbial danger of a man getting near to another man without prior, expressed permission. Tommy stumbled backwards in shock. “Sir?” asked McIvor, almost crossly, unknowingly close to the sudden death that Tommy in his crowded mind had already inflicted on him, opening his face, stamping him into a vivid carpet of guts and clarified fat.
Tommy bit back the vision and submitted, eyes closed, his arms outstretched to accept his crucifixion.
“On ye go, then.”
He suffered then, Tommy Hunter, in a way that only those who have been abused, and have learned to prevent any further abuse with frightful retribution, can suffer, as he allowed this little man to touch him, probe him. Against every instinct he suffered, as this parody of invasion took his inside leg.
McIvor, miraculously still alive, stood then saying: “I think, perhaps … sir has put on a little weight …”
“How?” demanded Tommy disbelievingly, opening his eyes and grabbing the measuring tape.
Mr McIvor puttered at him. “A matter of an inch or two on the waist …”
Hunter recovered himself from fury and accepted the evidence, handing the tape back to the tailor, forgiving him who knew not what he did. “Right,” he said, and looked straight at him.
Did McIvor glimpse, in that moment of eye contact, the whirlwind he had come so precipitously close to reaping, him and his Urizenic measurements? No, he did not. He just stood there not knowing what anything meant. By means of rescue for the both of them, Tommy gave him an envelope from the bedside table. Still uncomprehending, McIvor took the thing and wondered vaguely what it was and what he was supposed to do with it.
“£298.96. That right?”
McIvor looked at the envelope in his hand, and slid a podgy finger in the aperture. Tommy, insulted, and maybe even with irony, turned up his own vocal expressiveness just a little.
“Ye no gonnae count it, are ye?”
Penetrating the fog to which an unconsidered life had reduced his vision, a light went on somewhere inside Mr McIvor’s medulla oblongata. Never dreamt of such a thing, it told his sluggish forebrain, while simultaneously driving an adrenal jolt of flight into his legs (that had to struggle past the cholesterol, right enough), but having succeeded, a pulse of unaccustomed circulation rattled the coins in the package in his hand. Startled by the sound, obeying the better angel of his nature, McIvor of Ross and Dean, Gentleman’s Outfitters puttered again and giggled like a small girl and as he left the room backwards, the door seemed to shut in his face by magic.
3.4.1
When he had gone (not daring to open the envelope till he was well outside, as he later told DS Boyle), the tailor found the money to be correct. So, more or less right with the world, he went back up the road to tell young Mr Dean all about it, while Tommy, by contrast, back up in his hotel bedroom, looked balefully at the slightly too tight trousers on the bed and the slightly gappy shirts in the bag. “Fuck,” he said. The universe had let him down again. Without another thought, Tommy sat on the floor to do some exercise.
3.4.2
Hour after hour after hour of press-ups, sit-ups, prison calisthenics, pausing only to place his single other recorded call to a phone box in Carntyne at a prearranged time, never communicating with anyone in any other way than the peculiar rhythmic thumping his exertions evidenced in the surrounding rooms, which no one thought twice about, even when they heard them. No one complained, according to the hotel day or night books. Again, according to the hotel records, as examined by DS Boyle, Room 417 never had a meal brought up until “Mr Morton of Greenock” checked out next day, in a well-fitting suit, carrying a carpet bag containing his second suit and a second pair of shoes, three shirts, two pairs of pants and socks, and £33,611.04, having paid ninety pounds for one nights’ bed and breakfast, getting no discount for not having had any breakfast, and having slept, apparently, on the floor … if at all. His sheets were clean of his DNA. He was positively identified in the police lab by the towels and discarded clothes he’d left in the bath on the Friday morning.
3.5
The night before Hunter’s egress, Joe had stopped by brother Frank’s for a bite to eat with Frank and Eleanor, which was by no means a regular occurrence, let me tell you, especially on a Tuesday. Frank’s oldest, Katherine, was upstairs busily preparing for her Advanced Higher English exam in two days’ time, rereading Miss Jean Brodie. The younger of the offspring, Curtis, was plugged into YouTube like a sphinx, re-editing classic cartoons with swear words and screaming noises under the soubriquet of Badluckcrow. They were both for keeping well out of the way of Uncle Joe, whose thunderous demeanour had never, for them, unlike for Ronnie and his fellow inmates in another world, held any glamour. They’d had left over chicken earlier anyway.
3.5.1
Downstairs over dinner, and after, in the drawing room, the conversation hadn’t flowed so much as belched from time to time. Joe had got redder and redder listening to the pair of them debating the merits of the universities whose open days they had recently attended, turning over his plum and couscous salad like a forensic vet examining a turd. Now Eleanor, whose sartorial as well as culinary tastes leaned to the near and far oriental, draped herself and her flowing dupatta across the chesterfield, looked between the brothers with languorous superiority and asked the questions it hadn’t occurred to either of them to ask.
“What does he want? What did he actually say to her?”
“Who?” asked Frank. Joe looked at him with suspicion. It didn’t take much.
“Elspeth Dewar. What did he SAY to her?”
“I don’t know. Does it matter?” asked Frank, puzzled.
“Why did he go and see her?” Eleanor had a way of asking simple questions that made everyone feel like a dick.
“Has he talked to you? Have you seen um?” Joe demanded of his brother. Frank ignored him for the moment.
“I’ll go and talk to her,” he conceded, gratefully, to Eleanor. Frank was no fool. He knew Eleanor was smarter than he was. He turned to Joe, who he knew wasn’t.
“What about you? Any word?” he asked, knowing the answer in advance, deflecting further questioning of his own prior knowledge.
“A’d uv fucken told ye, woodenta?” Joe answered truthfully as Frank had known he would. Joe sank deeper into an Italian armchair that was worth much more than him at any reasonable estimate, hating his brother for knowing him so well, feeling vaguely he ought to ask him something else and not knowing what.
“He’s getting ready for something,” said Eleanor. “He’s going to show himself eventually. When he does, we’ll know what he wants.”
“We spoke to Ronnie, we’re meeting Bellamy. I think they’ll both let us know if they hear anything.”
“Who else might he talk to? What was her name? The grandmother. Janice’s grandmother?”
Frank shook his head. “She’d not tell us anything, even if Hunter had been to see her. Not without …” Frank glanced at his brother. Eleanor felt safe enough to tease them, reaching for a chocolate.
“What are you afraid of, both of you? He’s just out of prison … he doesn’t want to go back.” She settled back and popped her praline where it would do her most good. Joe snorted with contempt. Eleanor flared her eyes at him, her voice even. “What?”
Look at them, he thought. They think they have it all. They can’t see that they are not safe but only enclosed here, the two of them, in illusory security — that the thickest walls are but thin and permeable, that old reputation offers no current protection. He looked at Frank’s dull face and thought how old his brother looked.
They’d used to tan houses just like this one, the two of them, just for laughs, just to show they could, when they were kids, stealing without discrimination, laying a shite in the piano, wondering, like Loyd Grossman, what kind of cunt would live in a house like this? So what made Frank think now that his alarm system and Eleanor’s expensiveness and a degree of education for their children made them safe? Children that they actually talked to when they came in to say goodnight. They talked to their children, like people in films. He snorted at them again at that thought, and they stared at him.
3.5.2
Mentally, every time he came here, Joe was torching the place, gleefully, bitterly raping them all, killing them all, leaving them all to burn. And as he looked into their hateful, healthy, intelligent faces, he knew that they were the helpless ones in this world, that he could protect them or turn on them, just as easily, with an alike impulsiveness, that he could choose to save or lay waste to their universe, just to show them he could. Just like Tommy Hunter could.
And Joe smiled at them, almost lovingly. They recoiled from him as if he’d lifted his leg and farted.
3.6
Meanwhile, in his tiny room, all night, Tommy Hunter sweated himself into fitting the clothes that he had ordered. He’d no time for alterations; no alterations were conceivable except in himself. These, after all, were likely the last clothes he’d ever wear. He had already decided his appointments.