by Louise Welsh
‘I didn’t know you had legs, Mrs Noon.’ He grinned. ‘I thought you were a mermaid. Great singers, mermaids. They lure poor sailors to their deaths, just for the fun of it. Beautiful creatures, beautiful and cruel.’
‘You wouldn’t want to hear me sing.’ The manageress placed his half-full glass in amongst the empties on her tray. ‘That really would be a cruelty.’ She watched Rab neck the dregs of his pint then took his glass from him. ‘Time to head home, gentlemen.’
She was right. They should have left hours ago. Now here he was, drunk and sober at the same time. Each half of him disgusted at the other.
Someone had propped the doors open. The crowd was thinning, people sinking the last of their drinks, reaching for their jackets, all the heat and chatter drifting out into the night. He stretched an arm towards his beer, but Mrs Noon sailed the tray up and away, beyond his reach.
‘What happened to drinking-up time?’
It came out too loud. He caught the barman throwing Mrs Noon a questioning look and the woman’s answering shake of the head.
‘You heard the bell, that’s drinking-up time over. Do you want to get me into trouble?’
He was a lecturer in English literature at a distinguished and ancient university. He straightened himself in his chair and summoned forth the spirit of Oscar Wilde.
‘Don’t you think you may be a little old for me to get you into trouble, Mrs Noon?’
‘No need for that now.’ Rab was pulling on his jacket. ‘You’ll have to excuse my colleague. He is the recipient of bad news.’
Murray lumbered to his feet. The battle was lost, there was no more drink to be had, no possibility of reaching the required state here. The landlady disregarded Rab’s apologies and turned her practised smile on Murray: ice and glass. She’d once told him she had a daughter at the uni.
‘I was just thinking the same thing of the pair of you. You’re both too old to be getting into trouble. Go home, gentlemen.’
Outside black cabs and private hires edged along the road accompanied by the bass beat and infra-bright lights of sober boys in souped-up cars. It was another kind of rush hour, Friday night chucking-out time, louder, younger and messier than the into-work-and-home-again crowds. Here came the smashed windows, spilled noodles, lost shoes and sicked-up drinks, the pigeon breakfasts and trailing bloodstains.
Two teenage girls perched on the windowsill of the latenight Spar passing a bottle between them while a yard away their friend snogged a youth in a tracksuit, their joined mouths sealed vacuum-tight. The boy’s hand slid up the girl’s crop top. One of the drinkers tipped back a swig from the bottle, arching her body, her short skirt riding up her thighs. For an instant she looked like an advert for the elixir of youth. Then she lost her balance and bumped against her companion. Both girls giggled and the one who had nearly fallen shouted, ‘Fucking jump him if you’re gonnae or we’ll miss the bus.’
The boy broke the clinch, grinning at his audience, then pulled the girl back to him, whispering something that made her laugh, then push herself free, staggering slightly on her high heels as she tottered towards her friends.
‘Virgin,’ the teenagers taunted, passing her the bottle.
Lyle Joff gave them a stern look. ‘I should bloody hope so.’ The girls sniggered, nudging each other, and Lyle took refuge in his kebab. He didn’t speak again until they had passed the group.
‘If I caught Sarah or Emma behaving like that, I’d lock them up until they were thirty. Fuck it, thirty-five. I’d lock them up till they were thirty-five and even then I’d still want some guarantees.’
Murray looked back at the girls. They were at the bus stop now. One of them – he wasn’t sure if it was the one who’d been doing the kissing – pushed the boy. The youth stepped into a half trot, shouting something. The girls roared back, united now as they rushed at him, their high heels clattering against the pavement, laughing, full of victory as the boy ran off down the street.
Murray joined in the laughter. Some people had more talent for life.
‘Brief Encounter.’
Lyle said, ‘It’s not funny, Murray. Boys like that take advantage of young girls.’
Rab asked, ‘What age are Sarah or Emma now? Five and seven? You don’t need to worry about that for a few years.’
‘Three and six. Remind me to look up convent schools in the Yellow Pages in the morning. Here, hold this a minute.’
Lyle thrust his half-eaten kebab into Murray’s hand and nipped up a lane. Murray lifted the swaddled meat and salad to his mouth, crunching into vinegar, spices and heat. When had he last eaten? There had been a packet of crisps in the pub, but before that? Some sauce escaped the wrap and ran down his chin.
‘Hey.’ Lyle emerged from the alleyway. ‘I said hold it, not eat it.’
‘Sorry.’ Murray wiped his face. He took a second bite then handed it back. ‘I don’t know how you can stomach that stuff.’
Lyle fed the end of the kebab into his mouth and started picking at the shreds of salad and onion left in the paper. ‘I used to live on these before Marcella got her claws into me.’
His expression looked like it might crumple and he tore at the kebab with his teeth again, as if seeking solace.
They were passing the queue for The Viper Club now. Murray recognised a girl from his third-year tutorial group. She’d caught her long, straight hair back in an Alice band. Her dress was short, her white boots high. She made him think of the test-card girl, all grown up and gone kinky.
‘Hello, Dr Watson.’
He nodded, trying not to stagger. Ah, what the fuck? He was allowed a private life, wasn’t he?
Rab echoed his thoughts.
‘Sometimes you need to cut loose, connect with the elemental, remind yourself of the beauty of your own existence.’
Lyle scrunched the kebab’s wrapping into a ball and tossed it into a bin already brimming with rubbish.
‘For tomorrow we may die.’
The paper trembled on the peak of the pile, and then tumbled to the ground. Rab bent over, picked up the wrapping and stuffed it carefully back into the bucket. A look of satisfaction at a job well done settled on his face.
‘Right, what den of iniquity are we headed to next?’
*
The thin man with the long hair and the bandanna wanted a pound before he would let them in. Rab dropped three coins into the old ice-cream tub that acted as a till and they went up the stairs and into the electric brightness of the pool hall.
‘I should head back.’ It had been Lyle Joff’s mantra since he’d phoned his wife two hours ago, but he joined the queue for the bar with the others and accepted his pint. ‘Just the one, thanks. I’ll need to be thinking about getting home.’
The room was busy with the quiet clack of billiard balls and the low murmur of conversation. They were in the first wave of pub exiles and serious pool players still out-numbered those for whom the hall was just another stop on the night’s drunken highway. It was about a year since Murray had been here, a night on the town with his brother Jack, but it was as if he’d just stepped out to take a piss. There were the same faces, the same closed looks and poker expressions. The same mix of scruff and cowboy-cool, the lavvy-brush beards, arse-hugging jeans, Cuban heels and tight-fitting waistcoats. Fuck, you’d have to be hard to wear that gear in Glasgow.
Rab lowered himself behind a free table.
‘Welcome to Indian country. What time does this place stay open till?’
‘Three.’
Rab’s sigh was contented, nothing to worry about for two hours.
Lyle stared silently at his pint, as if it might hold the possibility of enlightenment. Slowly his head sank onto his chest and his eyes closed.
A woman bent across the baize, lining up her options. Murray found himself following the seams of her jeans, up the inside of her raised thigh to the point where they met in a cross. He looked away. Would the tyranny of sex never stop?
He nodded towar
ds Lyle.
‘Is he all right?’
The woman telescoped her cue back towards their table and Rab shifted his drink beyond its reach.
‘He’s fine, he’ll wake up in a moment.’ Rab indicated a pair of women sitting near the back of the room. ‘Why don’t you go over there and ask them if they want a drink?’
The women might have been sisters, or maybe it was simply that their style was the same. Strappy tops and short feathery hair whose copper highlights glinted under the bright lights. They were grown-up versions of the girls he’d gone to school with. They’d never have looked at him then, but now?
It was stupid. He didn’t fancy either of them, and besides, he wasn’t up to the aggressive dance of tease and semi-insults that constituted a chat-up.
‘They’ve got drinks.’
‘Well, get up, pretend you’re going to the gents’ and offer them another one en route.’
‘Is that how James Bond does it? Hello, ladies, I was on my way for a pish and wondered if I could bring you anything back? Ever wondered why it’s going to say “confirmed bachelor” on your obituary?’
‘It must be better than mooning over Ms Houghton.’
Lyle Joff awakened slowly, like an ugly toy twitching into life in a deserted nursery. The flesh beneath his eyes trembled and then the eyes themselves opened. He blinked and turned his fuzzy gaze on Murray.
‘Rachel Houghton.’ He smiled dreamily. ‘Good arse.
Good everything else too.’
‘Lyle.’ Rab’s voice was warning. ‘We’re talking about a colleague.’
Lyle’s brief sleep seemed to have refreshed him. He wiped away the glue of saliva that had formed at the corners of his mouth and took a sip of his pint. ‘Listen to Professor PC. ’ Rab said, ‘Shut up, Lyle, you’re drunk.’
A couple of the pool players looked over. Murray raised his beer to his lips. It tasted of nothing.
‘We’re all drunk. Say what you were going to say, Lyle.’
‘Lyle, I’m warning you.’
Rab’s tone was low and commanding, but Lyle was too far gone to notice. He patted Rab’s shoulder.
‘Murray’s one of us, the three mouseketeers.’ He giggled. ‘It’s top secret. Rab said Fergus would have his balls strung up and made into an executive toy for his desk if he found out.’
‘The three musketeers, great swordsmen.’ Murray turned to Rab. ‘What’s the big secret?’
‘Nothing, Lyle’s just being provocative, aren’t you, Lyle?’
‘Not as provocative as Rachel.’ Lyle put an arm around Rab. ‘I wouldn’t have thought you had it in you.’
Rab lifted the arm from his shoulder. His eyes met Murray’s and all of the ruined adventure was in them. There was no need to ask what had happened, but Murray said, ‘Tell me.’
Lyle looked from one to the other, wary as a barroom dog whose master is on his fourth drink.
Rab sighed wearily.
‘What’s the point? She’s a free spirit, Murray, a generous woman.’
‘I want to know.’
A little beer had slopped onto the table. Rab dipped his finger in it and drew a damp circle on the Formica. He looked his age.
‘A one-off mercy fuck, that’s all there is to it.’
‘When?’
‘The end of last term. You remember all that hoo-ha about my introduction to the new Scottish poetry anthology?’
Murray did. Rab had been forthright in his assessment that a new wave of Scottish poets were throwing off the class-consciousness, self-obsession and non-poetic subject matter of the previous generation and ushering in a golden age. The new wave had leapt to the defence of their predecessors while balking at Rab’s description of them as non-political. The elder statesmen had been vitriolic in their assessment of academics in general, and Rab in particular. It must have been a week when war and disaster had slipped from the news because the row had hit the broadsheets. Rab had been derided by academics and pundits north of the border and a source of amusement to those south of it.
‘It all blew up in my face a bit. Some people thrive on controversy, Fergus for example, but I don’t. It got me down. Rachel dropped into my office one afternoon to commiserate and we went for a few drinks, quite a few drinks. Then when the pub closed I remembered that there was another bottle at my place. There’s always another bottle at my place.’ He gave a sad smile. ‘I didn’t expect her to come and then when she did I didn’t expect anything more than a drink. I was going to tell you.’ He laughed almost shyly. ‘But a gentleman doesn’t talk about these things.’
‘You bloody talked about it to Lyle.’
‘Oh, come on, Murray. I’m an overweight fifty-five-year-old poetry lecturer and Rachel’s a thirty-five-year-old dolly bird. I had to tell someone. Anyway, I’d been drinking.’
‘You’ve generally been drinking.’
‘That’s a prime example of why I didn’t tell you. You can be such a fucking puritan, I thought you wouldn’t approve.’ He gave a low laugh. ‘And then you told me that you and she … Well, I was jealous, I admit, but not jealous enough to throw it back in your face.’ Rab raised his pint to his lips and then wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. His tone slipped from apologetic to defensive. ‘I don’t see what you’re getting so hot under the collar for, anyway. She’s another man’s wife. She doesn’t belong to you, me or anyone else in the department she might have fucked, except maybe Fergus, and if so I’d say he’s doing a very poor job of holding onto his property.’
It was the female player’s turn again. Rab moved his drink as she pulled the cue back then fired a white ball across the baize. Murray watched it sail into the depths of a corner pocket, sure as death.
He imagined taking the pool cue from her hand and smashing it into Rab Purvis’s beer-shined face. Teeth first, then nose. He’d leave the eyes alone. He’d always been squeamish about that kind of thing.
Lyle said, ‘Are you okay, Murray?’
He didn’t answer, just got to his feet and left before any more damage could be done.
Murray had been walking for a long time. Once a police car slowed and took a look at him, he ignored them and they drove on past, but their interest seemed to be the signal for his feet to start a winding route home. He left the main road and wandered uphill into the confluence of wide lonely streets that made up Park Circus, the jewel in the crown of Glasgow’s West End. Sometime after parlour maids and footmen decided they’d rather risk their health in munitions factories or the battlefield, the smart residences had been converted into hotels and offices. Now they’d been deserted for city centre lets and were slowly being reclaimed by speculative builders. Murray drifted past the weathered To Let signs, half-seeing the sycamore shoots sprouting from neglected guttering, the broken railings and chipped steps that might tumble the unsuspecting into the dank courtyards of window-barred basements. The plague-town atmosphere of the shuttered houses and empty streets matched his mood.
He took his mobile from his pocket and accessed the number he’d taken from a list in the front office and stupidly promised himself he’d never use. The night was starting to turn. He’d reached the top gate of Kelvingrove Park. Down below in the parkland’s green valley, birds were beginning to sing to each other. Murray pressed Call and waited while his signal bounced around satellites stationed in the firmament above, or whatever it did in that pause before the connection was made. He let it ring until an automated voice told him the person he was looking for was unavailable, then hung up and pressed Redial. This time the other end picked up and Professor Fergus Baine’s voice demanded, ‘Do you know what time it is?’
Murray cut the call. He sat on a wall and listened to the birds celebrating the return of the sun, then after a minute or two his phone vibrated into the stupid jingle he’d never bothered to change. He took it out, glanced at the caller display and saw the unfamiliar number flashing on the screen.
‘Hello?’ His voice was slurred.
‘
Is that you, Murray?’ Fergus sounded wide-awake. Did he never sleep? ‘What do you want? Something urgent, I imagine?’
‘I wanted to speak to Rachel.’
It was ridiculous, all of it, stupid.
‘Rachel is asleep. Perhaps you can call back in the morning?’ The professor’s politeness was damning.
Somewhere in the recesses of Murray’s brain was the knowledge that now was the time to quit, while he still had the slim chance of writing the call off as a drunken indiscretion. But in the morning he would have lost his courage.
‘I need to talk to her now.’
‘Well, you can’t. Call back at a decent hour.’
The line went dead.
Murray stood and soberly surveyed the sunrise. A door in the empty street opened and some party-goers reeled out, their voices high and excited. A young girl drifted over and draped an arm around his shoulder.
‘Look, Dr Watson.’ She pointed unsteadily across the parkland. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’
The sun was fully up now and only a few streaks of pink remained smeared against the blue. The morning light glinted against the River Kelvin and caught in the trees, shifting their leaves all the greens and yellows in the spectrum. The birds had ceased their revels and calm had settled. Even the concrete hulk of hospital buildings in the distance seemed at one with the day. Murray looked at the new-minted morning and agreed that yes, it really was beautiful.
Chapter Seven
MURRAY WOKE SUDDENLY, not knowing what it was that had roused him. The blind was only half down, daylight filtering weakly into the room. He glanced at the radio alarm, but its plug had been pulled, the glowing numbers dead. Saturday or not, he’d intended to be at the library in Edinburgh for opening time, but his drunken self had opted for uninterrupted sleep. His clothes were draped carefully over the chair in the bedroom, the way they always were when he’d drunk too much. His watch lay on the top of the chest of drawers, amongst the kind of small change a man on a spree accumulates. Five past twelve. He felt like Dr Jekyll, his scholarly intentions ruined by a fiend of his own fabric. Murray slid from under the duvet, found his boxer shorts and pulled them on. Then he paused on the edge of the bed and listened.