‘The weather was lovely there,’ she said, getting up and hanging the postman outfit over her shoulder.
‘It would be an act of charity to come back and see me,’ I coaxed. ‘Being stuck in the house is pretty boring.’
‘Are you sure you need to stay indoors? With crutches—’
‘I wouldn’t like to risk having to get that amputation.’
After a thoughful pause, she laughed. The jackpot spun round all oranges.
‘If you won’t forget to do what I asked you, I’ll come,’ she said.
‘If I can manage,’ she cautioned.
‘Depending on whether I find that job.’
And she was gone – leaving me with the parcel.
‘It’s for Kilpatrick,’ I told Jackie. ‘How about you taking it? Someone’s to call for it.’
‘Why shouldn’t he keep it himself until someone comes?’ she asked.
I had re-invaded the kitchen and leaned at my old post watching her stir grated cheese into a bowl she was holding under her breasts like a painting ‘Girl with Fruit’: oranges no doubt.
‘Because he isn’t here. He’s gone off. Didn’t you know that?’
‘Gone off?’
The question came so sharply I stared at her in surprise.
‘He has an uncle in the country.’ I tried to see her face, but her head was bent in concentration over the bowl. ‘So I’m told. Anyway, that’s where he is apparently.’
‘It was that girl,’ she said, without looking up. ‘I thought it was you she was interested in – but she came for Peter, didn’t she?’
‘Peter’ she had called him. It came to me with a kind of shock that I might have found another member of the Kilpatrick Thighs Fan Club. She wasn’t fourteen though, and that let me feel prim and disapproving.
‘Whoever she’s interested in,’ I said ‘according to her he’s off to the country.’
‘Why should I care where he is?’ She banged the bowl down. ‘But he is due his rent. Not that he would—’
When she came back, she looked puzzled but, it seemed to me, relieved as well.
‘If he is gone,’ she said, ‘he went in a hurry for he’s taken nothing. That fancy jacket he’s so taken with is there. His pyjamas over the bed – even his toothbrush. If he’s gone to live with her, he hasn’t taken much with him.’
‘Live with— with Margaret Briody? No,’ I said, and then less confidently, ‘she’s just a friend.’ I didn’t like the sudden image I had of loudmouth Kilpatrick on top of Margaret. ‘I suppose even Kilpatrick is entitled to one friend.’
‘Not you though. It wouldn’t be you. You don’t like him. He doesn’t like you. Yet he sends you that parcel.’
I had known that it didn’t make sense, but put into words menace took a shape that couldn’t be ignored. It was as if she had put a curse on me.
‘Peter’s so thick with that fellow Muldoon,’ she said. ‘He would have sent it to him. I can’t see how it can be from Peter at all.’
‘Well, suppose . . . suppose he was in a hurry and he met Margaret – she’s a student and knows me – but she wouldn’t have known Muldoon.’
Putting back her hair from her cheek, she looked at me thoughtfully. I could see in her gaze a judgement on the feebleness of what I had just said. It didn’t follow that because someone was blonde and small built that she was a fluff brain. I was learning something new every day.
‘What’s in the parcel?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know.’
It sat on the table between us: about the length of a watchman’s torch, wrapped in brown paper that was taped and bound with fat hairy string.
‘It’s heavy.’ She shook it, holding it to her ear. ‘Doesn’t rattle. Who did she say was to call for it?’
I told her and she repeated the name after me. ‘He’ll be a foreigner.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘But I’m not sure of anything about him.’
‘You know him?’
‘In a way. After a lecture one of the Professors invited us back to his house. Brond was there.’
‘Oh.’ She relaxed. ‘If he was at your Professor’s. I suppose it’s all right then.’
‘It was the night I was ill. When I—’
‘I remember the night you were ill,’ she said.
‘Well, will you keep it for me then? After all, I might be out – if he came for it.’
‘You’re very eager to get rid of it. Or is it that you don’t want to meet this man Brond?’
‘No,’ I lied. ‘When I was ill, he came to see me in the hospital. He said he would get me a job in the summer.’
‘I don’t see why he would do that.’ For the second time, her steady gaze disconcerted me. ‘Why would he do that if he’d only met you the once?’
Twice. I had met him twice. Only the first time didn’t happen: it was a lie, a delirium. I had been sick.
‘I don’t like any of this,’ she said.
She turned to chop vegetables on the board. I had the crazy notion that I wanted to rest my head against her and tell her about the boy Brond had pushed over the bridge. It didn’t happen, I would tell her; it’s an impossible thing that never happened. Only, I would say to her, I don’t understand why every detail gets clearer. For something that couldn’t have happened, that didn’t seem fair. Chunk! Chunk! Chunk! Jackie hammered down the knife.
‘You take your parcel,’ she said. ‘If someone comes when you’re out, I’ll tell them to come back.’
With the parcel under my arm, I had the door open to go.
The blows came down on the chopping board and she raised her voice over them, ‘I don’t like your friend Margaret or her parcel. Give it to Muldoon. Get rid of it somehow. Give it back to the girl.’
‘But why?’
In my excitement, I went over to her and when she ignored me took her arm and held it to stop the stupid pounding. Pieces of vegetable were scattered off the edge of the board. She pulled from me.
‘Why must I get rid of it?’ I asked her. It was senseless expecting that she could know. Senselessly, I wanted someone to help me. ‘What’s wrong with it?’
There had to be something wrong, since Brond had come into my life again.
FIVE
To give the parcel back to Margaret Briody I had first to find her. I didn’t know where she lived, but she had still to get fixed up with a summer job so it was possible she might be in the Queen Margaret Union.
The entry hall looked forlorn in the morning. I went upstairs to the coffee room. There was no one in it or behind the counter. Going back down, I noticed how the light peeled back broken tiles and drew dirty brown scuffs on the concrete walls.
The hall that had been empty was filled by a tall girl who looked as much at home as if her father had bought the University as a coming of age gift.
‘I’m looking for somebody,’ I said to her.
‘Aren’t we all?’
It was no time for philosophy. The parcel stuck under my wet armpit like a limpet mine.
‘Her name’s Margaret Briody. She’s just finished her first year.’
‘So has everybody else. Finished the year, I mean. There aren’t many people about.’
She showed signs of moving on.
‘Isn’t there any way of checking if she’s in the building?’
‘Hold on.’
She disappeared behind a frosted glass door. When she closed it behind her, I saw there was a notice taped to the glass: Keep Out – This Means You. Music from a transistor started on the floor above and then turned off. Time passed.
‘Margaret Briody.’
I felt my ears twitch like a rabbit’s. There was a tannoy just above me.
‘Margaret Briody. Wanted in the hall, please. Margaret Briody in the hall, please.’
The tall girl came out.
‘If she’s about, that should fetch her.’
‘Will she hear that upstairs?’
She laughed.
&nb
sp; ‘You can’t get away from it. Even the loos are wired.’
When it had become pointless to wait any longer, I wandered down the hill to the Men’s Union. It was another hot day. A small wind lifted dust from the gutters and blew it round the wheels of parked cars.
After the empty spaces in QM, the Men’s Union seemed busy. A group were talking on the steps; I heard voices from the billiard room; in the lounge a scatter of figures nested in the deep shabby armchairs.
‘Have you broken anyone’s jaw since I saw you last, dear pacifist?’
He is wearing a tartan waistcoat louder than a pipe band in a phone booth. Even in this heat he looks cool, despite the fact I know he’s wearing woollen underwear down to his ankles – he always does and has a theory about it. He is a very old student in anybody’s book.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ he asks. ‘Are you ill?’
I sat down and the room settled steady again.
‘I just remembered when I last saw you.’
He stared at me suspiciously.
‘I suppose there’s a joke there I’m missing for some reason.’
I shook my head. I didn’t have the strength to explain. He nibbled a biscuit with large yellow teeth; there was a plateful of them in front of him, round small ones sparkling with crusted sugar.
‘It’s annoying,’ he complained, swivelling his big head and spraying as he chewed. ‘The people in this place get more ridiculously juvenile every year.’
‘There’s a reason for that, isn’t there?’ I responded automatically.
He had to be in his fifties, if those scars he claimed from the rifle butts of patriots were anything to go by. A life member of the Union, there was no good reason why he shouldn’t be sitting in that chair twenty years from now senilely sucking on sweet biscuits.
‘Just before you came in,’ he said breaking the biscuit with a sad little snap, ‘I was thinking of my fiancée. She was torpedoed in ‘43, you know.’
The last time I had heard him say that, someone in the group had snarled, ‘Torpedoed in the middle of the Mediterranean like?’ and he had looked puzzled while everyone laughed.
‘As a writer,’ he said, ‘I live in my memories.’
‘The last time I saw you,’ I said, ‘I was ill.’
‘It’s wretchedly true,’ he said, not listening as usual, ‘that here in Scotland we have this difficulty in finding our voice. I imagine at Oxford or Cambridge every fledgling can strike off an effect because he pulls on the teat of tradition. We, on the other hand, have to invent our manner as well as our matter. The Americans used to be the same – everyone having to begin all over again each time – but I suppose all those PhD theses helped to cure that – very self-conscious people, Americans. Unfortunately, not being English or Americans, for us that’s neither here,’ he broke his biscuit in two, ‘nor there,’ and popped the smaller piece into his mouth.
‘I was ill.’
He blinked slowly and moved his lips like a goldfish surfacing.
‘You look disgustingly healthy.’
‘The last time we met I was ill. I was on the operating table the next day. My system was full of poison.’
‘But now you’re healthy.’
‘I heal fast.’
‘Show me your stitching,’ he said and smiled disquietingly.
‘I wanted to ask you about— a dream I had.’
‘The afternoon’s improving.’ He edged up the collapsing slope of chair; the struggle producing inches of grey underwear over the belt of his trousers. ‘I love dreams – and people so rarely offer them now.’
‘I was walking over the bridge in Gibson Street and I saw a boy being killed.’
‘By a red Jaguar.’
‘No. He was lifted over. He fell on the wooden pier. A man lifted him over.’
‘Can you describe the man?’
‘No. It was a dream. Only . . . it’s stupid – I heard his bones breaking.’
He settled back with a cheated look.
‘I’ve heard more lurid adventures of the unconscious. I’d put it down to a presumptuous little cheese for last night’s supper.’
‘Not last night. I told you – the last time I met you. On the steps outside. It was the night I . . . fell ill.’
‘You remember your suppers uncommon clearly. Was it the cheese put you in hospital?’
When he laughed, the black spaces showed where soldier guards were supposed to have knocked out his teeth. I wondered if it might be true. Perhaps it was that night which had beached him among these easy chairs.
‘I’m not sure it was a dream,’ I said.
He took that calmly enough.
‘Pretty serious if it wasn’t,’ he said.
‘It would be murder.’
‘Probably yours.’
‘The boy’s,’ I said stupidly.
‘If you got a look at the man, yours too I should imagine. Assuming he ever comes across you. You would be the missing witness – in better days you might have been the death of him. Still he could feel strongly enough about these modern effete reproofs to return the compliment in the old style.’
He drew a finger across his neck. Above the collar, flesh sagged like a bag of soiled crepe. He was obscene and omniscient. I heeded the oracle.
He spoiled it by guffawing, wriggling as he settled into the depths of the chair.
‘I’ve heard better but you told it well.’ He patted his breasts in congratulation. ‘Mind you, I doubt it would be hard to decide which of us had the other one going there.’
‘Was a boy killed that night?’
‘Naughty,’ he said. ‘Know when to stop. That’s a mark of the artist too.’
Yet, outside I felt better. He was a gossipy compendium of information about what happened in or near University. No boy, no death. He had taken it as a joke. No death then. That night I must have been as sick as hell. Without bravado I stopped in the middle of the bridge.
It was another hot, still afternoon. The shadow of the bridge was black on the oily polluted water. Somebody had dropped a mattress over the parapet on to the wooden pier; its stuffing leaked out between beer cans and a jagged rubble of broken glass.
The footsteps coming from the far end of the bridge were very clear since the afternoon was so still. They limped light and heavy. On the whisky sign, painted on the gable end of the warehouse up river, a white letter hung like a swollen ladder, one rung to heaven. I was no sacrificial victim.
As the limping man came level with my shoulder, I spun round, and almost knocked the woman leading a child by the hand.
‘Drunk! drunk!’ she mouthed at me. ‘Drunk’ as a talisman against violence, not because the staring shock in her eyes believed it.
Their mingled footsteps faded as I lay against the parapet, more helpless than any of her children.
In the Kennedys’ hall, it was a silly technical scruple that made me hesitate about using their phone to make a call. I was sure the house was empty. It felt empty, settling in the heat, old timbers complaining. I put the parcel by the phone and looked up my diary for the date I’d taken ill.
I gave the date and asked, ‘Was there a report of a boy being killed that day?’
‘Would you give me your name and address, please, sir?’
‘It might have looked like an accident.’
I told him where the body had lain.
‘And your name is?’
Would they insist on that if you phoned to say you were bleeding to death? Probably. How else would they know it was you when they got there – apart from the blood?
‘You don’t need my name to give me a piece of information. It’s your district. A boy who died that day. By the river.’
I realised I was not alone. Kennedy stood in the doorway of the back sitting room. When he saw I was looking, he shook his head.
I put the phone down.
‘You shouldn’t make such a racket. I was well away to sleep.’
It seemed to be true: he w
as in bare feet, braces dangling from his hips. He yawned and ran two hands through his hair until it stood up in a bush. At the uncovered roots, there was a streak of what must be white hair that looked blond against the black.
‘Sorry. It was a bad line. I didn’t know anybody was at home.’
A bad line. Did anyone die, please, sir? All the time. Every minute of every day behind those stone tenement walls. Neighbours found them, the old solitaries, the unburied dead, like the old woman’s corpse her daughter had kept secret until the soft corruption dried into a shape on the bed.
‘I’m awake now anyway. Come through into the front parlour.’
As I followed him, I wondered if I should offer at once to pay for the phone call.
‘It’s the kind of day a drink is forgiveable. There’s only Guinness mind. Not that it needs an apology. The only good thing the Irish ever made, eh?’
By this time I had learned that Kennedy was that odd kind of Ulsterman who thought that Irish was whatever he was not.
From the sideboard he fetched two glasses. It was another milestone, I could see by the careful ritual he made of it, that I should be given a drink by him. I would have sworn there was no alcohol in the house. With his dour northern look, I had taken him for a sabbatarian and a teetotaller.
‘Better days!’ he said and drank in a long hungry swallow.
I followed his example though it wasn’t a drink I liked. The stupid idea came into my head as I drank that the dark bitter liquid tasted of death and the ambiguous lights on a city river.
Kennedy watched me with pleasure.
‘There’s nourishment in that. You could live off it.’ His face crinkled at some private thought. ‘I’ve known men who lived off it.’
I was astonished by the look of the room. I had been in it once before – the day I came in search of my new lodgings; that had been after my father’s only visit, when he had taken one look at the old tenement where cats fell like fruit from windows and asked me to find somewhere else. That day this room had been like the rest of the house, neat, clean, nothing new but everything polished. Now it smelt stale. There was an overturned glass on the sideboard; on the arm of my chair an ashtray balanced dangerously full of stubs.
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