He caught a bus into the town centre and walked for five minutes, keeping an eye out for Charlie all the way. He arrived at the stop opposite Rinaldi’s. What could he do but go home? He was standing there waiting on the next Wharryburn bus when the door of Rinaldi’s opened and a bunch of what the papers called ‘youths’ spilled out, five of them, loud and aggressive. Maybe old Joe had thrown them out, or maybe he was just happy to see the back of them. A moment later – a significant, deliberate space later – Charlie emerged. He stood in the doorway, looking up and down the street as if he owned it. He was wearing blue jeans and a black leather jacket Don had never seen before and he looked much older than eighteen. The others, twenty yards away, turned for him. ‘Come on, Charlie!’ Charlie waited, making a point. He wasn’t hurrying for anybody. Then he started to move. So did Don.
He cut across the road and came up behind Charlie. He was going to shout his name but instead he landed a slap on the shoulder of the leather jacket. He knew he was going to provoke a reaction, he wanted to see what it was. Charlie spun round flinging Don’s hand off and his fists were up and he was good and ready for it. When he saw who it was he eased off but there was no smile of welcome or relief. He said, ‘Ye shouldna dae that.’
‘Dae what?’
‘Come up behind me like that. Ye might get hurt.’
‘Maybe,’ Don said. ‘If ye sent for reinforcements.’ He nodded at the gang now ambling back to see what was going on.
‘Whae’s this auld cunt?’ one of them said. They were all skinny, pale, dangerous-looking.
‘This auld cunt,’ Don said, ‘is that wee cunt’s faither. And you, son, had better beat it because we’re haein a private conversation.’
‘Don’t tell me tae fucking beat it,’ the kid said. He had a white scar down one cheek that ran into a puckered repair job on his upper lip. ‘This is a public street.’
Charlie said, ‘Fuck off, Kenny. I’ll catch ye later. See yese later, boys, eh?’
Don was amazed at how they melted back under Charlie’s gaze, deferring to his assurance, his greater intelligence perhaps. Even he, the father and begetter that had once wiped the bairn’s arse, was impressed.
The gang sloped off and Charlie fixed Don with a sneer.
‘Well?’
‘Come wi me,’ Don said, and his big hand gripped Charlie’s upper arm through the black leather. ‘I want tae show ye something.’
‘Take your haund aff my jaiket.’
‘If it was yours I might think aboot it,’ Don said. He was guiding them down a side street, saw what he was looking for up ahead, a close with an open door. He didn’t want to do this but he needed to try one last thing. Before Charlie could resist he hauled him in and down the dark passage till they were out of sight of the street. Then he pushed him up against the wall and pinned him there with a hand against each shoulder, arm’s length just in case he tried to stick the heid on him.
‘Now listen tae me,’ Don said, keeping his voice as low and controlled and firm as he could. ‘I dinna ken where ye’re getting aw the gear, son,’ he said, ‘but I ken it’s no aff a wage. So are ye stealing it, or taking a slice aff your granny’s pension, or are ye getting it some other way? Eh? Because ye’re no earning it. So how come ye dinna hae tae work when everybody else does, Charlie?’
Charlie waited, as if he were picking the question he preferred to answer. ‘My gran and me are fine,’ he said. ‘Aye, she gies me money sometimes. Ye ken why? Because she likes me. She likes me being there. I look efter her. She looks efter me. Any problem wi that?’
‘That’s no enough. Where dae ye get the rest of your money?’
‘In my haund. I dae jobs for folk that dinna bother wi paperwork. That’s aw you need tae ken.’
‘Have you or ony of your wee bastard friends been up at Wharryburn threatening the Khans?’
‘What?’
‘Ye heard me.’ Don’s arms were beginning to shake with the pressure he was exerting. ‘Have ye been threatening Saleem Khan?’
‘The village Paki?’ Charlie turned his head and spat on to the stone slabs. ‘What would I fucking dae that for?’
‘For protection.’ Don could feel himself beginning to tire. Any second now the arms were going to go into spasm.
‘Protection fae what? Mexican fucking bandits? Think we’re the Magnificent Seven? They’re nothing. Fucking peasants. They’re just like everybody else up there only the colour of shite. I wouldna waste my time.’
‘If you ever set foot in that shop again I’ll come and find ye and break your fucking legs.’
By rights Charlie should have been terrified. He was eighteen, a boy. He should have been pissing his breeks but he wasn’t. To show how relaxed he was, he yawned.
‘Is that you finished then? Can I go?’
Don saw a slow, wet smile slide across his son’s lips. As if they’d both been acting all along, as if Charlie had been biding his time and only now was this thing, whatever it was, really going to start.
‘Jesus Christ, Charlie! Is that aw ye’ve got tae say? “Can I go?” This is me, your faither, speaking tae ye. But who the fuck are you, Charlie? Who the fuck are you?’
He heard himself. He who’d always prided himself on not using curse words was surrendering his tongue to them, even as the last of the strength in his arms ebbed away. He suddenly felt insecure, as if he’d stepped into a dark room and didn’t know who or what else was in there.
‘Who the fuck am I?’ Charlie said. ‘Is that really what ye want tae ken?’
He didn’t wait for an answer. With one quick shift of his body he threw Don back, smacking him against the opposite wall so that all the breath flew out of him. Before he could refill his lungs Charlie’s forearm was pressing hard against his throat, choking him. Charlie levered the arm, forcing him up on the toes of his boots. Don heard the wheeze of the last bit of air leaving his windpipe.
‘So this is who I am, faither,’ Charlie said. The derision in the last word was palpable. ‘The difference between you and me is thirty years and the fact that you play at being hard but really ye’re saft as fucking butter. Ye dinna like this stuff, dae ye? The violence. Ye’re only daein this because ye think ye have tae. Save the poor darkies. Save Chairlie fae himsel. Me, I fucking love violence. I could get the chib oot noo and carve my initials in your face and I’d get a fucking hard-on daein it. Dae ye hear me? I like hurting people. See that wee cunt Kenny. I gied him that scar. He loves me for it. He’d fucking die for me. And that’s me being nice. But what am I gonnae dae wi you?’
He lifted the arm slightly and Don’s lungs worked like bellows for a few seconds before the air was clamped off again. Charlie had it thought through like a professional torturer. He said, ‘Tell ye what I’m gonnae dae, I’m gonnae be extra nice tae you, faither. No because it’s your first offence because it isna, is it? But I’m gonnae let ye go anyway, and ye ken why? Because o my mither. But ye asked me a question so I’m telling ye the answer noo so ye never have tae ask it again. Who’s Charlie? This is Charlie. He’ll stay oot o your poxy wee village if you stay oot o his toon. Ken what, I’ll make it easy for ye. Ye can come intae Drumkirk, ye can even go and see my granny, but no when I’m there, or see that thing ye said aboot breaking my legs, I’ll break your fucking legs and I’ll dae it so ye’ll never walk again and I’ll fucking enjoy daein it. And see if ye ever see me on the street again, stay oot o my fucking road. Don’t fucking come near me. Because if ye ever pit your haund on my shooder again I’ll turn roond and I’ll fucking cut ye.’
He stepped back. Don collapsed, gasping for air. He thought his head was going to burst all over the floor. He heard Charlie’s heels as he walked casually away. He lay retching, but nothing came up. After a while he forgot he was lying in the close.
It had still been light outside when they’d come in but it was dark by the time he started to push himself upright. Gradually the lungs eased off, the pounding in his ears faded. He got to his un-steady feet, s
taggered a few paces. If anybody stayed in this close they were all stone deaf or too terrified to come out. He felt like an old man. He wasn’t even fifty. He felt like an old man whose son had just died.
§
When he got home, much later, Liz wanted to know where he’d been, then she saw the colour of him. What had happened? He couldn’t bring himself to confess the humiliation he’d been through. He lied. He’d met Charlie, they’d had another argument, a bit of a fight. He refused to go into more detail.
He couldn’t articulate what he felt: the fear, the horror, the despair. He wanted to shut it all out and never think of it again.
Charlie was not to be spoken of in his presence. He never wanted to see him or hear him mentioned again. Liz could work out her own arrangements. He’d not stand in her way but Charlie had made his choices and Don would have nothing to do with him.
Liz said, ‘Ye canna dae this tae your ain son.’
‘He’s done it tae himsel, Liz.’
‘I’ll speak tae him,’ she said.
‘Dae what ye like,’ he said, ‘but I’ve had enough.’
§
If Sir Malcolm and Lady Patricia Eddelstane could not provide their son with money, they could provide him with contacts. After school, with three mediocre A Levels under his belt, David headed for Edinburgh, where he worked for a few months in an antiques shop owned by a cousin of his mother. He liked the city, although he was astonished at the run-down condition of much of the centre, including the street near Canonmills where he was lodging. He might have stayed, but the cousin was selling up the business, and London, the centre of the known universe, beckoned. Armed with an address book and a couple of offers of work, he headed south.
The two job possibilities were these: an old MP associate of Sir Malcolm thought he might need a ‘research assistant’, a newish term for an MP’s drudge; and the husband of a friend of Lady Patricia had an opening in his property business.
It turned out that the MP wasn’t intending to pay David anything, so he put politics on hold and took the job with John Harris Associates. He was the office boy but the understanding was that this would lead to greater things. ‘We were all the office boy once,’ John Harris assured him. ‘Isn’t that right, Q?’ ‘Quite right, Mr Harris.’
Harris was a fat, sprawling man who sweated heavily into the collars of his checked Viyella shirts, considered himself a maverick, and let everybody know by never lowering his voice. ‘Bugger the rules, that’s our motto, isn’t it, Q?’ he shouted. ‘Absolutely, Mr Harris,’ said Q.
Q was Quentin Williams, born and bred in Chiswick, never set foot outside London and saw no earthly reason for doing so. He was charged with showing David the ropes.
‘Where are you from?’ Q demanded. ‘Glen where? Never heard of it. You don’t sound Scotch. All right, this is what we do. We take bets on the property market. The unlikelier the property, the more we like betting on it. We pay people to take eyesores, wasteland, condemned buildings and empty offices off their hands. Then what do we do?’
‘Build something new?’ David suggested.
Q snorted with delighted scorn. ‘Nah! Too much trouble, too much expense. We get planning permission to build, but we don’t order a single brick. We pick sites in areas that are about to come up in the world and we sit tight. If we’ve done our homework right we don’t have to wait too long. Six months, a year, two years if we have to. Mr Harris says it’s like gestation. Six months is a monkey, twelve’s a zebra, two years is an elephant. Elephants are usually the best but sometimes three monkeys are worth more than one elephant, you with me? We pick our moment and then we sell. And the more we do it, the better we get at it. Very few of our investments go bad on us these days. He knows what he’s doing, Mr Harris, and so do I. You watch us and learn, you’ll be fine.’
Q was five years older than David. He intended to be a millionaire before he was forty. He was affable, self-contained, supremely self-confident. He explained things to David with barely concealed impatience, as if it was adding a year on to his target but couldn’t be helped because this was what John Harris had asked him to do. Q didn’t drink and he didn’t smoke and he thought drugs were as ridiculous as the hippies who took them. He passed through Swinging London every day on his way to and from the office or on site visits, and was untainted by it. He despised them all, the louche pop stars, the self-obsessed artists, the flower people, the junkies, the dropouts, the lefties, not because of how they looked or spoke or what they said but because they were deluding themselves. We all live in a yellow fucking submarine? Not Q. They were so busy agonising and protesting, navel-gazing and peace-signing, tuning in and chilling out that they were missing the main action. Well, it was their loss.
David made a half-baked attempt to excuse them. ‘Maybe they just need to let off some steam,’ he said. ‘Maybe we’ve all been repressed for twenty years. Ever since the war.’
Q gave him a look: do I look repressed? David backtracked. ‘Or probably it’s just me. I’m too square. I can’t help it but I am.’
‘Don’t feel bad about it,’ Q said, ‘don’t feel ashamed. You’ll still be here in ten years’ time. Half of those idiots will be dead, and the others will be trying to catch up with you but they won’t because their brains will have turned to fucking mush.’
‘I can’t even swear the way you do,’ David said.
‘Listen,’ Q said, ‘what is it everybody needs? Forget your free love and flower power and your Hare fucking Krishna. People need houses. They need jobs and places where they can do them. They need medicine when they get sick. They need their dinner. A drink to wash it down with. Not me, but I’m not everybody. They need protection, security. They need fuel for their cars, electricity for their washing machines. They need washing machines. They need weapons. You can gamble on everything else and get lucky, but those are the certainties. We do property and that’s fine but I’m investing the money I earn in other things too. Have you got any money? Don’t spend it on beads and pot. Stick it in the certainties. Spread it around.’
‘I don’t have any money,’ David said.
He didn’t, not right then, but there was some coming.
§
It was around this time that Lucy showed the first public signs of … what? Mental imbalance? Emotional starvation? Or an intense desire for self-preservation manifesting as self-destruction? Until she was eleven she’d floated around like a timid, idle fairy, easily provoked to tears, underperforming at the village school and generally behaving as if she didn’t belong there or anywhere else on the planet. Then she went to a boarding school in Fife. After four years there she shed her fairy wings and emerged as a revolutionary socialist. It was 1969, the summer of unlove. In her last school year she wrote to the embassy of the People’s Republic of China requesting two dozen copies of Mao’s Little Red Book, which she distributed among her classmates. She also smuggled in a small quantity of hashish and was caught smoking it, for which she was expelled. Returning to Ochiltree House, she gathered a few personal belongings and then was off again, pausing only to explain to Sir Malcolm and Lady Patricia that she hated them, their house and everything they stood for, that she was severing all links with them and going to live in a squat in London.
Freddy, home from school for the weekend, was present on this occasion, and reported it later to David. ‘I asked her if she hated me too, and she gave me a look that would have turned a lesser being to stone and said I was an obnoxious, bloodsucking letch. Or was it leech? So then I asked her if she hated you, and she said no, she just felt sorry for you because you don’t have any guts. I bet that makes you feel good.’
David had already been in London two years. What did Lucy expect him to do, denounce their parents as she did while developing his career in property speculation and beginning to dabble in Conservative Party politics? He might not be courageous but he wasn’t a total hypocrite. She, on the other hand, wasn’t even consistent. Not long after arriving in L
ondon she dropped Maoism and became a vegetarian anarchist.
He tried to look after her, arranging meetings with her once a month in a grubby little café off the Portobello Road that served a lot of beans and a lot of flapjacks, and sometimes bean flapjacks. Against a backdrop of notices fringed with tear-off phone numbers advertising alternative medicine, guitar lessons and rooms to let, he would hand over some cash and buy her something that passed for a nutritional meal. She wouldn’t accept the money unless he pretended it was a donation to whatever insane cause she was currently espousing. The cause changed every few months, but the money was always taken with the same total lack of grace or gratitude. At one meeting she berated him for his shallow moral values, his failure to understand his own guilt by association with the evil that was world capitalism; at the next she informed him that she had discarded useless concepts like guilt and morality – the condition of contemporary society could be understood only through analysing and exposing the façade of advanced capitalism, and then creating new situations in which human desires could be fulfilled rather than degraded. She was a situationist. Some weeks later she denied this: anti-situationists had sabotaged the idea by taking it literally instead of recognising the inherently theoretical nature of any situationist situation. ‘Say that again,’ David said. ‘No,’ she said, ‘if you don’t get it you don’t get it.’ ‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘That’s because you’re so acquiescent,’ she said. ‘No, you’re complicit. You voluntarily accept the so-called reality of the present moment. I refuse to do that.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because reality is obviously always an artificial construct.’ ‘How can reality be artificial?’ he asked, kind of wishing he hadn’t. ‘Oh, David,’ she said, exasperated. ‘The people with economic and political power determine the way the rest of the population perceive the world at any given moment, so it’s only real because they say it is.’ ‘Is this real?’ he asked. ‘What?’ she said. ‘Us, here, eating this ghastly food at this present moment?’ Suddenly she looked as though she was going to burst into tears. ‘Sorry,’ he said. He found arguing with her pointless and exhausting, and did it less and less, absorbing her disdain, much as he had absorbed that of his parents, because it was less painful than exposing her vulnerability. If that made him a coward, he liked to think it was kindness that made him one.
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