The Bad Fire

by Campbell Armstrong

  Jackie winked at him and said, One day we’ll hire a boat at Balloch and go fishing.

  That day had never come.

  Joyce said, ‘I don’t suppose you want a quick tour of the old homestead, do you, Eddie?’

  The prospect depressed him. ‘But thanks for the offer,’ he said.

  ‘Another time.’

  13

  They drove the quarter of a mile from Onslow Drive to Joyce’s place, a one-bedroom second-floor flat in a dark red sandstone tenement. Eddie took his bag from the car and followed his sister up the stone stairs.

  ‘You can phone Claire from the living room,’ Joyce said. ‘I need a nightcap. You?’

  ‘Maybe a soft drink,’ Eddie said.

  ‘Irn-Bru?’

  ‘Irn-Bru, Jesus, I haven’t had that in a lifetime,’ Eddie said.

  ‘You’ll be happy to know it tastes the same as it always did. Dyed sugary water with loadsa bubbles.’ She went into the kitchen.

  Eddie looked at the bookshelves in the living room. They were stacked with paperbacks, many of them old orange-covered Penguins. Absently, he scanned the titles as he reached for the phone. Hugh MacDiarmid. Tom Leonard. A Scottish selection among European classics. Kidnapped beside The Brothers Karamazov. Ivanhoe leaning against The Castle. Joyce had always been buried in a book as kid. Granny Mallon, a sharp-eyed little woman with short silver hair and bulbous arthritic hands, used to say, Get her out in the fresh air with a skipping rope before she goes blind.

  Eddie picked up the phone, then realized he didn’t know the dialling code for the USA. He decided he’d call collect – but what was the number for the international operator? He looked for a phone book among the general clutter of the room, magazines, ashtrays, empty glasses. Joyce’s private chaos. The prints on the walls were arranged in no specific pattern. Lithographs and sketches of famous writers, musicians, prints that publicized gallery openings or museum events, a few San Francisco Filmore examples, Bob Dylan, Hendrix. There was also an assortment of half a dozen busts in classical style, faces carved out of old stone, one missing a nose, another an ear: they looked like Greek philosophers pondering facial surgery.

  Joyce came into the room carrying two glasses. ‘I hope you appreciate I tidied this place up for you,’ she said.

  ‘I’m grateful,’ Eddie said. He indicated the busts. ‘Quite a gallery.’

  ‘I found them in Dad’s warehouse over the years.’

  She handed him a long glass filled with a fizzy red liquid. He sipped it; exactly as he remembered. So sweet he imagined sugar armies scaling the enamel battlements of his teeth.

  ‘How do I get the operator?’ he asked. ‘I want to make a collect call to Claire.’

  She told him, he dialled, got through to Queens in a matter of moments. Claire sounded close at hand, a voice in the next room. They talked inconsequentially of the flight, then Claire wanted to know how Joyce was. Eddie glanced at his sister and thought she looked exhausted.

  ‘Hard to say,’ he remarked.

  ‘You can’t talk right now,’ Claire said.

  ‘You got it.’

  ‘You met Senga yet?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She’s … I guess she’s what I expected.’

  ‘You sound tired. Call me tomorrow.’

  ‘I will. Love you.’

  Claire said the same thing, then Eddie hung up. Cutting the connection caused him a little jolt of sadness: I still love my wife after all this time. He guessed that seventy-five per cent of his colleagues, maybe more, were divorced, separated or serially unfaithful. He couldn’t imagine another woman in his bed.

  Joyce closed her book, picked up her wine. ‘Claire’s okay?’ she asked.

  ‘Fine.’ Eddie nodded. ‘I like this room.’

  ‘I’m glad, because you’ll be sleeping in it. The sofa you’re sitting on opens into a bed. It’s comfortable.’

  Eddie took a swallow of Irn-Bru. ‘Tell me about Chris Caskie. I didn’t know about his existence until tonight.’

  ‘I suppose his name just didn’t crop up,’ Joyce said. ‘How many times have we met since you left anyway? I’ve been to the States, let’s see – three times in thirty years, Eddie.’

  ‘It’s not enough, I know,’ Eddie said, and sighed. ‘It’s my fault. I should have made the effort to come over –’

  ‘I’m not blaming you, Eddie. You have a whole life over there. Responsibilities.’ Joyce placed a cigarette between her lips, but didn’t light it.

  Eddie watched her and thought, I could have made the trip on any one of my vacations, but I didn’t, I was afraid, not of seeing the city again – but of coming face to face with Jackie and entering the maze of my own emotions.

  What would he really feel about his father? That first contact, whether handshake or hug, how would that have been? Stiff and tentative, warm and welcoming? Uncertainty had kept him from Glasgow. He’d become accustomed to the phantom he’d constructed in his mind – an unreliable man, touched by a wild streak, but honest: a man who meant well most of the time, although circumstance and his own flaws sometimes conspired against him.

  Joyce blew cigarette smoke. ‘Chris Caskie was the kindly uncle nobody else in our family knew how to be. He had contacts in universities, he could get the low-down on what universities had the best teachers – the kind of stuff that was light-years away from Jackie’s world. It’s a funny situation when you think about it, the avuncular cop wondering how he can arrest the father of his adopted niece.’

  ‘Did he want to nail Jackie?’

  ‘I think it became a kind of standing joke,’ Joyce said. ‘But a serious one. They enjoyed each other, only they just couldn’t relinquish their roles. In the blue corner, Detective-Inspector Caskie, career cop. In the red, Jackie Mallon …’

  ‘Mallon the what?’ Eddie asked.

  ‘How can I put it? The alleged criminal?’

  ‘No more than alleged?’

  ‘I really don’t think he did much more than chisel the Inland Revenue any chance he got. Sometimes I had the feeling Dad said stuff deliberately to get up Chris’s nose. He’d make a reference to a crime he’d heard about, and how he might know the names of a few guys responsible. Chris always pretended he wasn’t taking the bait, but you could tell he was storing it away to check later.’

  I missed all this, Eddie thought. I missed Caskie’s role in Joyce’s life, the give-and-take between Jackie and the cop. He’d been robbed of something essential. Suddenly he wasn’t the brother, he was a stranger staring through a window into a room he didn’t know. His sister had made the transition from child to woman and whole areas of her life were blacked out to him. Her first lover, who was he? Her amphetamine infatuation, which she’d first mentioned five years ago, how had that come about? You could love her with all your heart, but you could never fill in the gaps.

  He said, ‘I want to know more about Jackie.’

  ‘What exactly?’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘Narrow it down, Eddie.’

  ‘Start with his business. Tell me about that.’

  ‘He mentioned retirement only a few weeks ago. He was saying how much he was looking forward to becoming one of the wrinkly leisure class. He was going to have a big sale of the inventory in the warehouse, then he planned to sell the building and the yard. I got the impression, right or wrong, that he may have had money worries.’

  ‘If he sold his stock and his building, his cash concerns would have been over,’ Eddie said. ‘At least alleviated.’

  Joyce said, ‘Unless he had really big debts … but it doesn’t matter any more, does it?’

  ‘No, I guess not.’

  ‘It’s past, the business is history.’ She stared into her wine. She ran a finger round the rim of her glass. ‘You know, about a month ago he came here and his face was this boozy bright red colour, and he grabbed my hand and he said it had been a terrible mistake to hurt Flora, and it was something he’d
regretted all his life. It was maudlin, but I believe he meant what he was saying. He hadn’t been able to persuade Flora to stay with him, so he’d reacted with what he called “shameful cruelty”. And then he just wept. I’d never seen him do that before. He buried his face in his hands and cried for a long time. It was the saddest thing.’

  Eddie was quiet for a moment. ‘Last time he phoned me, about six weeks ago, he said he wished he could go back and change the past. He’d been drinking then too.’

  Joyce said, ‘He couldn’t express his feelings without a lubricant. It’s all that macho Presbyterian stuff you get drummed into you when you’re growing up in Glasgow. A real man never weeps, he just gets on with things.’

  Eddie rose from the sofa and walked to the window and looked down into the street. The streetlamps were surrounded by so many small winged creatures the effect was of silvery liquid movement. His mind slipped back to the day of the departure from Glasgow, and he pictured Joyce as he’d stepped inside the taxi with his mother. He remembered Flora, weepy but trying to be all business, saying to the cabby, Take us to the airport fast, we’ve got a plane to catch, and the cabby, a man with a lazy eye that looked off into a wild blue yonder, coming back with something sarcastic like, Are ye sure ye don’t want a bloody police escort, missus?

  Eddie had turned his face as the cab pulled away and he’d seen Joyce watching from the shadow of the house in Onslow Drive, skipping rope held limp in one hand, her black hair curled and a big bright blue ribbon on the crown of her head. Her look had been one of puzzlement and pain.

  The image made him ache.

  Eddie said flatly, ‘He cut the family in two.’

  ‘Like a madman with an axe,’ Joyce said.

  She walked to the window and stood behind her brother, and put her arms around him, clasping her hands against his chest. He covered one of her hands with his own and said nothing, just watched the streetlights. A car slid past slowly below.

  ‘I can’t imagine Flora’s state of mind,’ Joyce said. ‘Your husband tells you he’ll fight for custody of both kids, he’ll drag you through the whole legal system even if it takes years and he’s got the cash to do exactly what he threatens. He issues an ultimatum – choose one kid, or risk losing both.’

  This was the version Eddie had heard so many times from Flora. He looked at his sister. How frail she seemed in the soft light of the lamp; almost like a kid on the cusp of adolescence.

  She said, ‘Jackie always tried to do his best for me after Flora went. I couldn’t bring myself to hate him for what he’d done. Oh, I tried. I really wanted to hate him. I used to get down on my knees and pray I could learn to hate him. God, teach me to hate … Daft. In the end, forgiveness takes less energy.’ She smiled, sipped a little wine. ‘Have you forgiven him?’

  ‘I like to think so,’ Eddie said. ‘Or maybe I’ve just fudged what happened in the past. Discarded it. I’m not sure.’

  ‘You know, I used to think Flora chose to take you to America because you were her favourite.’

  ‘No. She thought I could cope with the upheaval better because I was older. She was obsessed for years with saving money and hiring a hotshot lawyer in the States to fight for custody of you, but time passed, and she could never get the cash together …’

  Fatigued, Eddie moved to the sofa, lay down. He crossed his hands on his chest and stared at the ceiling where the lamp created an oval of weak light. Giving up a child, he thought. It would hurt like hell. It would be a pain you could never alleviate. Day after day you’d haul a sense of loss around with you, and people might detect it in your mannerisms, the far-off look that would come into your face. But it wasn’t only Flora who’d given up a child. Jackie Mallon had deprived himself of his son by his own brute act of spite. He’d punished himself as well as Flora.

  That one big mistake, Dad. That heartbreaking cruelty. That’s where the halo is corroded.

  He was beginning to drift now. Couldn’t fight it much longer. After a while he heard Joyce stub her cigarette. He felt her kiss his forehead softly and say, ‘We’ll get through all this.’

  ‘Sure we will,’ he said. She switched the lamp off. The darkness was comforting. He heard her cross the floor and enter her bedroom. She closed the door quietly.

  He lay, fully clothed, on an unfamiliar sofa he didn’t have the strength to open into a bed.

  He slipped into sleep, dreamed he was dancing, he and Senga waltzing on board a cruise ship. The orchestra played ‘Moonlight in Vermont’. The conductor had Flora’s face. In the dream he looked at the tattoo on Senga’s arm and he knew what it was. It surprised him. He thought: I’m mistaken. He woke briefly, considered the tattoo, then everything floated away from him and he fell into a sleep that was deep and this time dreamless.

  14

  At six thirty a.m., Billy McQueen, AKA Billy the Stump or Billy Wan-Fittit, read the morning newspapers in his Merchant City penthouse. The building in which he lived had been a derelict warehouse before razor-brained developers realized that the city centre of Glasgow was a very desirable place to live, if you were of the cellphone, fast-buck, nightclubbing slick-car generation; and so Merchant City had been created out of shabby Victorian warehouses and banks and offices, its new apartments purchased by lawyers and glitzy media types.

  Billy McQueen didn’t come into these categories. He was a middleman, a fixer who brought people together to make deals, and he took a generous percentage of profits for his troubles. He insisted on receiving a portion of his fee upfront as a token of goodwill. Officially he was an accountant, the profession specified on his income-tax returns, which were invariably works of superlative invention. He had no training in accountancy; he lived and operated in cracks and shadows.

  He was insomniac because he drank gallons of rich coffee every day. His internal clock was in a state of confusion. His complexion was the colour of cigarette ash. He had a pendant lower lip that gave him the look of a man trapped in a lifelong grudge. He Brylcreemed his hair lavishly; wherever he slept he left grease-pits on pillows.

  Dressed in sky-blue silk pyjamas and matching robe, he flicked the pages of the papers quickly; he was interested only in information about the murder of Jackie. What he read was bland and unsatisfying. The investigation is ongoing … yackety-yak. He felt the journalists were keeping facts back. Or maybe it was the police. You could go a step further and think they were in collusion, a clique of scribblers and cops.

  He got out of bed, leaving a trail of newspapers. He limped into the kitchen. Twenty years ago, at the age of eighteen, he’d lost his left leg below the knee when he’d been drunk and taking a short cut across a railway line in Cowcaddens, and a train had whacked into him. Since then he’d worn a series of prosthetic limbs, some better than others. His present attachment chafed his stump a little, but he’d learned to live with discomfort, although he’d never grown accustomed to his demeaning nicknames. The Stump was an insult. So was Wan-Fittit – or, more properly, One-Footed.

  That bloody short cut turned out to be a longer cut than you ever expected, didn’t it? his father had said to him after the accident.

  Ho ho. Comedian.

  The kitchen was a big white room with granite surfaces. The skinny girl at the table was smoking hashish and reading the magazine section of an old Sunday Mail which was mostly fluff about rockers and film stars. McQueen hated tabloids. He liked the broadsheets. He liked to think he was scuba-diving in the Sea of Information, not just floating on the surface.

  The skinny girl, who had an urchin’s white face, said, ‘I just made coffee.’

  ‘I’ll partake,’ said McQueen. He filled a mug from the percolator. He sipped the coffee. His hands trembled. The girl’s name was Leila, a regular supplied by a discreet escort agency he used. He liked to think of Leila as more than a call-girl. A friend. A lover.

  Billy’s life was separated into compartments. He lived with his manic depressive, ailing father in a four-bedroom flat in a respectable street
in Hyndland. West End, red sandstone, classy. Larry McQueen didn’t know about the penthouse in Merchant City. He thought his son travelled to distant cities on business trips.

  Billy looked at the girl as he blew on the surface of his coffee. She wore a tight-fitting little sweater and black bikini underwear. He checked the time on his watch: 7:04. He knew his father would be awake. The old man slept only four hours a day, from midnight to four a.m. He was troubled by nightmares.

  Billy picked up the phone, punched in a number and heard his father answer.

  ‘How you doing?’ McQueen said.

  ‘Awright, awright.’ Larry McQueen’s voice was stressed. ‘Where are you anyway?’

  ‘Manchester,’ McQueen said. ‘Did you take your medication?’

  ‘What are you – my bloody nurse? ‘Course I took my medication, for all the bloody good it does me.’

  McQueen held the phone away from his ear and let his father rant. He pictured the old guy sitting up in bed, moaning and whining. Billy tried to be a dutiful son. He did his best. He really did. It wasn’t easy. Some days the old fellow would lie on the living-room sofa and stare at the ceiling and say nothing, lost in secret melancholic depths, or else he’d take out his dilapidated guitar and strum a few truly depressing Jacobite folk tunes, like ‘Will you no’ come back again?’

  He wanted to put Larry into a nursing home, but he didn’t have the heart to evict the old fellow. He’d even hired a part-time nurse to look in on his father a couple of times a week, but Larry was abusive to this scrawny old biddy who was called Thelma Rogan. Whenever he could, Billy escaped to Merchant City, fifteen minutes away from the West End by taxi. In the penthouse he could have Leila and a sense of privacy in a place where his father couldn’t find him.

  ‘What year can I expect you?’ Larry asked.

  Sarcasm, always the dead-weight sarcasm. ‘A few hours. I’m not sure.’

  ‘You’re never precise, are you? It’s a wonder to me that you ever made it as an accountant when you can’t even tell the bloody time. Eh? How did you manage it? Did you bribe the examiners? You’re a numpty, Billy.’