‘It’s not a disease.’
‘Is it not? It’s a sickness, that’s what I think.’
‘Don’t be so ignorant.’
‘Don’t you dare speak to me like that.’
‘Don’t speak to me like that.’
It was hopeless and horrible and predictable but even then Isobel’s sense of propriety began to assert itself. Something closed over her face. Already she was working out how to accommodate the dreadful fact into the other facts of her existence.
‘Well, we’ll just have to get on with it, won’t we? When you said you were coming I invited Bob Syme round for dinner, since you seemed to hit it off at Christmas. So. Can we agree that we won’t discuss this in front of him?’
‘Don’t you think he’ll be able to handle it?’
‘I don’t think,’ she said, ‘it’s something we’ll want to talk about while we’re eating.’
‘I’ll tell him before, when he’s got a big whisky in his hand. That should help.’
‘You really are making this as difficult as possible for me, aren’t you?’ she cried. ‘I’ll just have to phone Bob and put him off.’
‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘I’m not staying.’
‘But I’ve bought all this food.’
‘Well, make up your mind, will you?’ he shouted. ‘Do you want me as I am or as you’d prefer me to be? Do you want a happy wee party with your boyfriend where no food gets wasted and nobody says anything that might possibly upset anybody else or do you want a bit of honesty in your life? Do you think Bob will even care? He’ll probably think it’s a huge joke. He’ll probably bet me twenty quid I’ll have grown out of it by the time I graduate.’
She gave him a wounded, contemptuous look.
‘Bob Syme,’ she said, ‘is not my boyfriend.’
He went to his bedroom to collect his bag.
§
Jean says, ‘Pour me just a touch more, Mike.’ He breaks the seal on the Clynelish and fills her glass. She says, ‘I don’t suppose this is helping much, is it?’
‘Helping what?’
‘This thing you’re supposed to be writing about Angus. Part of the reason you came was to talk about him, and we’ve polished off a whole bottle of whisky and hardly mentioned him.’
‘He’s not been entirely absent from the conversation.’
‘No, and it’s true we did start with the photographs.’
‘Yes. Was he here often?’
She hesitates, but only for a second. ‘Quite often. Sometimes in the chair you’re in. Does that feel strange to you?’
‘Probably not as strange as it feels to you.’
‘You do look just like him.’ She smiles. ‘But you’re a lot older now than he was when I knew him.’
‘So now you know how he turned out. Like son like father.’
‘Well, I have something to say about that.’ Again she hesitates. ‘And it’s going to be difficult, and my question to you is, do you want me to say it now or in the morning?’
‘Why not now?’
‘Because I want you to remember it.’
‘I’m listening.’ Finally, he thinks, after all these years, she’s going to talk about their relationship. About Angus and Jean.
‘I wouldn’t say this if I didn’t love you, you understand that?’
‘It’s going to be bad, then.’
‘That depends on how you take it.’ She has another roll-up ready, and lights it. ‘So do you want me to tell you, or do you want to tell me? Because unless I’m very much mistaken, you do know.’
‘Stop talking in riddles, Jean.’
‘Okay. The reason why you’re struggling with it? Why you’re not writing it? It’s because you can’t, not without facing up to something.’
‘And what’s that?’ he says.
‘He was better than you. There, I’ve said it. Would you like me to elaborate?’
‘I’d love you to.’
‘Don’t get defensive, Mike, and don’t blame me. It’s written all over your face. You know it as well as I do. You’ve known for years, which is why you hide away up there in the north endlessly photographing the same things in the same places and never showing anyone what you’ve produced. And it’s why you’ve taken it upon yourself to be the custodian of his archive, why you’ve spent the last two years preparing this exhibition. You set out to be better than Angus at what he did, and it didn’t turn out that way. You’re a perfectly good photographer, but you haven’t got that special thing that Angus had. You just haven’t got it. And you spend your days – I’m guessing, because I don’t know how you spend your days – circling round that big, unavoidable truth, dealing with his photographs because that way you don’t have to deal with it, or maybe you take hundreds of photos of your own, hoping that just one of them will be better than the photo he would have taken without even thinking about it. Your dad is always going to be better than you. Nothing you can do can change that. Tell me I’m wrong.’
He feels queasy, not with the whisky, not because she’s hurt his feelings, because she hasn’t, but with a kind of excitement. He thinks of his obsessive ordering of digital images, the ranks and ranks of disks marked by date, the other disks containing his best pictures of boats, stones, sand, sea, clouds, heather … So there are thirty thousand negatives in the Angus Pendreich collection. There are three, five times that many digital files in the Michael Pendreich collection. And this is not simply a matter of technological advance. This is not only about hard-drive capacity. There is no mystery in what she is telling him.
‘Of course you’re not wrong,’ he says.
‘So accept it and start engaging with the real world again. Tear up what you’ve written. If you’re going to write about him, do it honestly. Say what a shit he was. Say what a child he was. Say how much you loved him. Did you ever actually tell him any of those things? Or did you just let him get away with it all?
‘Or maybe you shouldn’t write this essay at all. Get somebody else to write it – Duncan whatever his name is. Let the pictures speak for Angus. Cut out the notes unless they’re absolutely necessary. Everything else is a distraction.’
He nods. There is nothing he can say that won’t sound like whining. So he keeps his mouth shut.
‘And go and talk to Isobel,’ she says, ‘before she’s away too and you’re left with all that stuff unsaid. She’s your mother, for Christ’s sake.’
He breathes out heavily.
‘Sorry,’ she says.
‘It’s all right. Like you said, we’re way past that.’
‘Do you hate me?’
‘Don’t be absurd. What are a few home truths between old friends?’
‘That’s very generous of you.’
He says, ‘Now it’s my turn.’
§
Stupid. Cutting across the Meadows, not drunk but not sober either, he saw three guys coming in his direction and didn’t register that he might be in trouble until they were almost on him. He was heading home from a party he’d managed to gatecrash that same night, after leaving his mother with too much food in Doom. He’d snogged a lonely girl then abandoned her as some way of getting back at Isobel. Stupid. The three guys fanned out to cut off his escape routes. One was roaring, ‘There’s the cunt that stole ma fucking money!’ Another was shouting, ‘That’s a fucking poof!’ The third didn’t say anything, just steamed in, boots and fists going like a windmill. Mike tried to jink past off the path and on to the grass but the grass was wet and he slipped, went down on the ground and the three of them were on him and then in some mad silent-movie moment they all slipped and fell too, the four of them scrabbling to see who’d be back on his feet first and it wasn’t Mike and the boots came in. ‘Ya fucking poof ya fucking cunt try this up your fucking erse take this in your mooth.’ He curled up tight as he could trying to save his balls, hands over his head trying to save his head, feeling his fingers and elbows and shoulders and legs getting battered, Jesus they were going to break his fing
ers. Don’t kick my head, he was thinking, just don’t kick me in the head, and they were laughing, ‘This is what we fucking dae, poof, we fucking kill ye,’ and he thought, how do they know I’m a poof, then there was shouting from somewhere and they gave him another couple of kicks like they had horseshoes on and were away jeering into the night. And he lay there thinking, well I’m not dead anyway, and slowly, slowly uncurled himself and a group of students were there, lassies as well as guys, ‘Are ye all right, mate? Are ye all right?’ and somehow he got to his feet and his legs were jelly and he fell off them and stood up again and the girls said, ‘Oh my God!’ and he couldn’t see for blood and a couple of the guys helped him to the infirmary which handily was just a few minutes’ stagger, where they left him, thank you, thank you, to sit with the other walking wounded in A&E, the drunk and bloody battalion of victims of a Saturday night in Edinburgh.
A nurse cleaned him up and bandaged his bruised hands and put a patch over one swollen eye, and a doctor put a few stitches in his head and said he was lucky. ‘Lucky?’ he said. A policeman who seemed to be on permanent statement-taking duty and who must have been getting cramp in his fingers took one from Mike that wasn’t going to lead to anything unless he lost the eye, in which case, the officer said, he could claim criminal-injury compensation, and between times Mike sat in a dwam and thought, well, I had a choice. I could have betrayed myself and had a quiet night in Doom with Isobel and Bob Syme or I could have done what I did. And I did what I did, and that was the right choice, but there’s a price, Michael Pendreich, for being gay in this country, and you just paid it. Even if the bastards who did this to you didn’t care if you were gay or straight, a Hearts fan or a Hibs fan, a Proddy, a Tim or an art student, they gave you a doing for being available, and in a way they were just putting into actions what your mother couldn’t put into words. Then the hospital people gave him some extra dressings and let him go home, and he limped down the road to Tollcross and crawled into his bed.
When he got up late on Sunday afternoon he could hardly move. Eric was watching the telly when he edged into the front room. ‘Bloody hell, Mike,’ he said, ‘what happened to you?’ So he told him, and he told him everything, because up until that point, in spite of what he’d said to Isobel, he’d not been up front and honest about his sexuality, it was still only 1974 after all. And Eric said, ‘Well, what if you are gay? Who gives a damn except ignorant bigots?’ ‘You mean you don’t?’ ‘Of course I don’t,’ Eric said, and then, being a medic, he took charge. He changed the dressing on Mike’s eye and checked the cuts and bruises elsewhere and said, ‘You’ll live,’ and although Mike suspected Eric didn’t really know what he was talking about, he agreed with him. ‘Aye, I will.’ Then Eric ran him a bath, and while he lay soaking in it made them their tea, and they sat and watched garbage on the TV till close-down.
§
Mike used to see Sam – ‘the biker’ as he’ll always think of him – from time to time. Sam would come on to him – ‘I tellt ye, I tellt ye, I said this was what ye wanted’ – and Mike would tell him to get lost till it became a joke between them. ‘I’m invincible,’ Sam said. ‘I’ll persuade ye sooner or later.’ Sam wanted as much sex as he could get. Why not? The worst that could happen would be a dose of the clap but he’d have a lot of fun getting it. There was one club, you went in and there were more cocks on display than bottles on the gantry. Not Mike’s scene. He wanted intimacy, not excess. Sam said Mike was copping out, if you were gay you had to flaunt it. ‘Why?’ ‘Because if you don’t, if we don’t, we’re still not visible. If we slink about in the shadows the way you do then all we’re doing is saying thank you for tolerating us, we promise we’ll be sweet and discreet and we won’t upset you. That’s not good enough.’ Mike said, ‘I don’t see it like that, but even if I did I can’t make myself be like you. It’s just not who I am.’ ‘Suit yourself, dear,’ Sam said, and he did. He drifted back to his preferred haunts in the Old Town, to Sandy Bell’s, to Jean Barbour’s. It was easy enough to get sex when he needed sex. A lot of the time, he didn’t need it.
At the end of his first year at college, he decided he couldn’t face a summer in Doom. He stayed on in the flat at Tollcross, as did Eric, and got a job in a café on the High Street, serving weak coffee and overpriced cakes to tourists. Money was tight. On his days off he wandered round the city, taking pictures, going to free exhibitions. It was Festival time: there were endless opportunities for photographs. He used the college facilities to develop them, and stuck them up outside the Fringe office and in other locations with his name and phone number written on the back. Somebody might notice. Somebody might want more of the same.
One day, on Princes Street outside Jenners, he bumped into Freddy Eddelstane. He’d had no contact with him since leaving school, but there he was, as antique and ugly and fleshy as ever, accompanied by a taller, thinner, altogether more prepossessing version of himself. This was his older brother, David. It turned out that they knew somebody who knew Eric Hodge and they were all supposed to be meeting for a drink when the pubs opened.
‘What are you doing these days?’ Mike asked Freddy.
‘Not a lot. Didn’t want to do any more bloody exams after school, so I’ve been hanging out at the ancestral pile mostly, but things are getting a bit fraught there. Threat of expulsion if I don’t get off my arse. Think I’ll go to London and make pots of money. That’s what David does.’
‘If he’s going to London, I’m coming to Edinburgh,’ David said. ‘Little parasite.’
‘It’s the way I was brought up,’ Freddy said. ‘Youngest child and all that. David has a more heightened sense of social responsibility. He’s decided to follow the noble Eddelstane tradition and go into politics. He fought a seat in the election in February. Lancashire or somewhere. Didn’t do badly, did you?’
‘Lanarkshire, Freddy. No, not badly. Better than expected. Safe Labour seat, of course. If they put up a donkey it would win it.’
‘He’s going to contest it again whenever the next election happens,’ Freddy said. ‘Glutton for punishment. Meanwhile, we’re going shopping. Want to come?’
‘No, thanks. I’m going to an exhibition at a gallery down at Canonmills.’
‘Well, why don’t you join us for that drink later?’
He named a bar at the other end of the New Town. Mike said he’d see them there.
‘What’s the exhibition?’ David Eddelstane asked.
‘Photographic. It’s called “Love Hurts”. The photographer’s from Edinburgh originally, makes a lot of her humble roots, but she’s been away a long time. More Guardian than Granton now, I think. Her stuff’s been causing a bit of controversy because it’s about sex. The usual Mrs Grundies want to close it down.’
‘Sounds better than trailing round the shops with him,’ David said. ‘Mind if I tag along?’
In those few seconds looks passed between them. Mike remembered what Freddy had said once about his brother. David seemed affable enough. Surely there was no harm in spending an hour or two with him, even if he did have ambitions to be a Tory MP.
‘Not at all,’ Mike said.
‘Great. Let’s go and see what the fuss is about.’
Freddy said he’d give it a miss and meet them later at the pub. He headed off, and the others set off to find the gallery.
‘Love Hurts’ was disappointing, and crowded with the disappointed. The photographs expounded a thesis on relations between men and women that was obvious, possibly even correct, but deeply depressing. There were a few breasts and a flaccid penis or two, and some images with S&M connotations, but most of the pictures were of couples, in various states of dress or undress, failing to communicate with each other. A naked man looking out of a window while a woman sleeps. A man and a woman at opposite ends of a sofa, both for some reason in their underwear, both staring straight ahead at the television. A woman trying to feed a squalling child while a man reads the paper. They gave the impression of documentary but
to Mike looked like they’d been posed, and however worthy the thesis he didn’t think they were any good as photos. ‘They don’t do anything for me either,’ David agreed. The gallery was hot and oppressive. They left and walked through the Botanic Gardens, busy because of the fine weather, then across Inverleith Park, until they came to the path leading to the Water of Leith. Down there it was shadier and cooler, and there weren’t so many people.
‘I’m serious about moving back to Scotland,’ David said. ‘I’ve been in London six years and it just gets dirtier and noisier and smellier. There’s no denying it’s where everything happens, politically, I mean, but I intend to stand in a winnable Scottish seat eventually so I should really set myself up here too. Get the best of both worlds.’
‘Freddy said you made money,’ Mike said. ‘What is it you do?’
‘Investments, of one kind or another. Property’s my thing, really. There’s a lot one could do in Edinburgh. It’s all just waiting to be exploited. We need a change of government, of course, but then that’s why I’m getting into politics.’
‘We’ve just had a change of government.’
‘I mean a real change of government. Even if Heath got back in, it wouldn’t change things. Not really change things.’
Mike could have made an argument out of it, but couldn’t be bothered. Why spoil the moment? It was August and the sun was shining, and Edinburgh was looking its best, and there was something else in the air, something in the way they caught each other’s eye, the way their arms brushed as they walked. They talked about Kilsmeddum Castle and agreed what a dump it was, and after that line of conversation was exhausted Mike thought it quite likely that they didn’t have much else in common. But still they walked on together, under Telford’s bridge and into Dean Village, and on through Stockbridge. They were killing time, really, before the pub opened. Mike said, ‘I think there’s a short cut up this way, shall we try it?’ They went down a mews and came to a dead end, and were about to turn back when David said, ‘What about in there?’ pointing to a low wall with a bit of broken fence and a gap where the grass had been worn away by the passage of many feet. They looked as if to dare each other. David said, ‘I’m up for it if you are,’ and they went through the gap. There was a faint path between bushes and trees, and on either side were quiet streets full of parked cars. The streets seemed abandoned, they could see out on to them but if they didn’t move they wouldn’t be seen from them, but to be sure they went deeper, past broken glass, dropped cigarette ends, bits of paper, a plastic bag or two, with the rich smells of vegetation and cat’s pee and something dead and something human mixing and closing around them. The ground was dry mud with occasional scraps of pale grass. They were mere yards from everything but it felt as if they’d entered a magical yet decaying space. And then it happened. They were down on their knees and groping, feeling for each other through their trousers, and then they both unzipped and masturbated each other on to the hard ground. Like a competition, a schoolboy trick. They had to stifle their giggles and then Mike stopped laughing and felt stupid and ashamed, as if he were thirteen, and if only he had been, if only he’d been thirteen, if only he’d got to do this at thirteen, but he hadn’t, he was a grown man and he’d just tossed off a prospective parliamentary candidate for the Conservative and Unionist Party.
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