My Life as a Man

by Frederic Lindsay

  ‘Home,’ she said.

  ‘But it’s early.’ Stupid thing to say.

  She understood me, though. ‘The factory? Is that where I should be? Sitting outside the factory?’

  We went through Cambuslang, Burnside, Kingspark. I watched the names of the streets go by. I wasn’t sure what roads would take us to the factory, but that’s where I wished she would go. I wanted to wind time back for her and make everything all right.

  In a street of shops, I asked, ‘Could you stop here?’

  When she pulled in, she didn’t switch off the engine. I listened to it and watched the people going by. The sun was shining; you’d have thought someone would be smiling.

  ‘It’s your car,’ I told her. ‘Go where you want. I’ll get out.’

  She turned to look at me. I don’t mean just her head. She twisted round from the shoulders to get a good look at me.

  ‘Like you did before.’

  It took me a moment to work it out. She meant the day before, that’s all it was, only the day before, outside the BBC in Queen Margaret Drive.

  ‘That’s right.’ I mean, Christ! why not?

  ‘You came back then. Why did you do that?’

  I thought about it and lied. ‘I was drunk,’ I said.

  ‘No. You weren’t.’

  ‘Because I was stupid?’

  It wasn’t easy to bring back the image of the look she’d given me when I said I’d get out and leave her, for it had gone almost as soon as it came, so quickly it would have been easy to believe I’d imagined it. Yet I wouldn’t have been sorry to see it back again. Being looked at as if I’d crawled out from under a stone was better than the blank nothingness of her expression now; you could have carved it out of ice.

  ‘Would you tell me one thing before you go?’ she asked. ‘Why did you drive the car away?’

  Another question that had been a long time coming.

  For want of any better answer, I told her about the week’s lying time and how her husband, Mr Bernard, had fired me.

  She looked at me in disbelief. ‘That was all?’

  That and having no future and no home.

  ‘He called me Mr Gas,’ I offered.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I didn’t get out of the car. Apart from being fired and the contempt of Mr Bernard, some image of a knight, some absurd notion of rescue, had been part of the crazy impulse that had got us into this mess, though I couldn’t imagine ever admitting it. For whatever reason of her own, she didn’t question my staying. She didn’t take us to the factory, though, perhaps not wanting to put my courage to the test.

  I’d been right about one thing. Grey stone, bow windows, the Mortons lived in just the kind of house I’d imagined for her. The gates were open and she took the car into the drive, pulled up close to the garage and switched off. Here at the side of the house it was quiet. The garage doors were wood with four little windowpanes on either side at the top. You’d think someone with a factory would have a metal door on his garage. One of the glass panes was cracked. I listened to the engine ticking as it cooled, and thought surely now had to be the time to jump out and run for it. A goodbye speech, so far as I could see, wouldn’t be expected.

  ‘Have you any money?’ she asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘No, of course you haven’t. I’ll find something.’ I stared at her. ‘You can’t just wander off without a penny.’ She opened the door and started to get out. ‘Don’t worry, he won’t be here.’

  The hall was long and narrow and, when my eyes adjusted to the dimness after the sunshine outside, I saw a stair going up and another that curled in a tight spiral down into the gloom of what must have been a basement. I leaned on the rail and peered down, but the stairs went out of sight before they got to whatever was down there. I took a couple of steps down, changed my mind and came up. I wandered from one end of the hall to the other and stood looking up to the first-floor landing. Whatever she was doing up there, she was taking her time. I imagined her rummaging through a drawer for a purse, the way she might to pay the milkman. Maybe she was trying to decide how much, putting some of the coins back. Tired of thinking that way, I opened a door and the room beyond was flooded with sunshine.

  There was a table covered in papers, so big it filled the whole middle of the floor, and glass doors on the far wall. Though it was the ground floor, there was a balcony beyond the glass and I could see the tops of trees. A folded partition at the back gave a view into a second room with fat dark leather chairs you’d sink into, and beside them little tables with mats. An arch opened on to a third space with a desk and a wall lined with shelves crammed with books. Curiosity made me go in to see what kind of books they were, and I was reading the titles when her voice behind me said, ‘Oh, this is where you are, then.’

  ‘I wasn’t touching anything.’

  ‘The books belonged to his father. Bernard’s not much of a reader.’

  ‘Nice.’ Nice, all the same, I meant; nice to have so many. ‘You’d never be short of something to read.’

  She frowned at the shelves. ‘I never saw Papa Morton with a book. He had his stroke just before I met Bernard. After we were married, everyone took it for granted I’d look after him, maybe because I’d been a nurse. I came back from my honeymoon to this house.’

  ‘It’s a nice house,’ I said. What did I imagine I was trying to tell her? That she’d done well for herself? What did I know? I was only eighteen. The good thing was that she didn’t pay any attention. Still frowning at the shelves, she might not even have heard me.

  ‘The first time I saw him lying in bed he seemed old to me, but that’s because I was young. He was only in his fifties. It was years before he died.’

  Afterwards she gave me money and I took it. I stood in the street outside her gate and told myself I’d taken it because I didn’t know what else to do, and I went over ways I might have refused, gracefully so that she would have been impressed; and then I thought, No, you took it because you had no money and it’s a long way to walk home.

  And after all when it came to it I did go on foot half across the city. I walked because before anything else I had to get to a main road; and then I walked because I wasn’t tired. As I walked from one stop to another, I checked the route numbers for the buses and trams. They went by me halfway between one stop and the next. I couldn’t be bothered joining a queue to wait, walking was nothing to me. At last, I came to a stop and people were getting on a bus. I’d walked past it before I glanced up and saw its destination; and then I got on as if that was what I’d been waiting for.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I walked by the factory gate twice, the second time all the way to the corner where I could see the bus stop. While I stood, a bus came. It would have taken a good run to catch it, but maybe the driver would have waited for me; some drivers did. I watched it go, then returned to the gate and this time went in, not giving myself time to think. I was back where I had begun a week ago.

  I’d assumed I’d have to talk my way upstairs, but there wasn’t anyone behind the counter. Dully, from behind the door that led to the factory, machinery clattered. Saturday was a working day. A phone rang somewhere through in the back and when it stopped I heard the murmur of a woman’s voice answering. Maybe the receptionist had gone somewhere quieter to practise her sneer. I took the stairs two at a time before I lost my nerve.

  The left-hand door lay open and I could see a filing cabinet with folders lying on top and one of the drawers pulled out. The middle door was Mr Bernard’s. I knocked and waited. I mean, there wasn’t any question of me bursting in. It was my hope that this was going to be a pretty low-key and civilised discussion. I knocked again and a voice inside made a noise that might have been ‘Come in’.

  The man behind the desk had his nose in a pile of papers. When he looked up, I recognised the fat bookkeeper. ‘Yes?’ he said vaguely. Behind the thick glasses, his eyes looked unfocused, as if he was still absorbed in a column of figur
es. He shoved fingers through hair already standing on end.

  ‘I wanted to see Mr Morton.’

  ‘So? Can I help you?’

  ‘No.’ I started to move back out of the room.

  ‘Wait!’ The high-pitched voice soared into a bat squeak that stopped me in my tracks. ‘What makes you assume – Anything to do with this business, I can deal with it. You understand? Any . . . single . . . thing.’

  If there’s anything I hate, it’s having an idea spelled out to me one word at a time. A teacher’s trick that says, If I speak any faster, someone like you will be too stupid to take it in.

  ‘It isn’t about work,’ I told him.

  He shook his head as if he didn’t believe me. ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ He gave a flap of the hand, which looked petulant except that when the tips of his fingers hit the desk they hit it hard.

  ‘I wasn’t here for long,’ I said. One week paid for in cash; thanks to him, come to think of it.

  Then he did a funny thing. He looked down at the desk again and began tidying the papers he’d been working on. ‘Give me a minute,’ he said, which kept me there. He squared the pile, tapping it at the sides and top and bottom. He had big, puffy hands with fingers swollen as if they had too much blood pumped into them. He pushed the papers to one side so that the desk in front of him was clear, and when he looked up I saw that he had recognised me.

  ‘What have you done with her?’

  I stared at him. It hadn’t occurred to me that the whole factory would know what had happened.

  ‘Is Mr Morton here?’

  ‘You can talk to me.’ When I didn’t answer, he said, ‘He’s not here.’

  ‘Has he gone home?’ The edge of panic in my voice surprised me.

  ‘Is that where Eileen is?’

  ‘Eileen?’

  ‘Bernard’s wife,’ he said impatiently.

  Then I remembered her story about her father organising the washing of the dishes. ‘Eileen and Mother’, she’d remembered him saying – and that was how I’d learned Mrs Morton’s first name.

  ‘What happened yesterday? What did she say to you? Did she ask you to take her away? You can tell me.’

  I shook my head. It was what I had come to explain, that it was all my fault, but not to him.

  ‘I’m Mr Norman, Mr Bernard’s older brother.’

  Fine, I’d call him in evidence. He could tell his brother that I hadn’t even known her name.

  ‘Where has she been all this time?’ he asked.

  ‘Nowhere.’

  ‘Nowhere all night?’

  ‘We slept in the car.’

  ‘The two of you?’ Disbelief puffed out his cheeks in a long breath. ‘She’s gone off her head. Where was this?’

  ‘On the way back from Edinburgh.’

  He threw up his hands as if to fend off any more. ‘But now she’s at home?’ I nodded. ‘What are you here for?’

  ‘I wanted to tell Mr Bernard his wife didn’t do anything wrong. I drove the car away. She couldn’t stop me. He shouldn’t blame her. Where is he?’

  ‘Not here.’ I took it that meant Mr Bernard had gone home. Before I could say anything, he asked, ‘What made you steal the car?’

  I was so worked up I didn’t hear him properly. I blundered on. ‘It was all my fault. From the minute I got into the car she kept saying, “Go back, go back!” But I wouldn’t.’

  ‘Why did you take it? You must have had a reason.’

  ‘I didn’t care about the car,’ I said.

  ‘Why take it, then?’ But as he waited I couldn’t think of any reason he would understand. ‘Have you brought it back?’

  ‘To the factory? What for?’ I wasn’t trying to upset him. I honestly couldn’t imagine what he was talking about.

  ‘So that my brother won’t charge you with theft. He might not – not if you’ve brought it back.’ It hadn’t even occurred to me that I could be charged with some crime. I hadn’t stolen anything. ‘You’d have nothing to worry about if you’ve brought it back.’

  ‘It’s at the house.’ Little bookkeeper! Fuck the car, I thought. ‘Your brother won’t be worrying about the car,’ I told him.

  He shook his head at me and gave a little sigh.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  There was a time when I started going to church and the minister, Mr Peters, listened when I finally got up courage to ask him about finding my father and said he’d think about it and let me know. On the way back to Mr Bernard’s house, I remembered Mr Peters because the only time he ever gave me a lift I was terrified. He jumped lights and went too fast and cut in on other drivers, shaking his fist and calling them fools. Who would have thought a minister would drive like a crazy man? That was exactly the way Norman Morton drove, fat hands clutching the wheel, except that he called other drivers cunts instead of fools.

  Reverend Peters didn’t swear. On the other hand, he never did get back to me on how to find someone in a big city. After a few months I stopped going to church. And if some day my father got round to sending another card, I wouldn’t ever know, not now I’d left home.

  Norman took us into Bernard’s drive so fast I thought he might carry one of the stone gateposts along for company. Then I remembered Mrs Morton saying this house had belonged to Bernard’s father. If it was the family home, Norman had been brought up here, too, and might have missed that gatepost by an inch a thousand times before.

  He tried to open the garage, but it was locked. ‘If she’s come back, where’s the car?’ He peered in between the doors. ‘Can’t see a thing.’

  ‘Why don’t you just go and ring the bell?’

  He spat on one of the glass panes and got up on tiptoe to rub it with the edge of his hand. ‘See if it’s there!’ he ordered and, when I hesitated, gestured at me to do as I was told.

  I wondered if he was trying to delay going to the door. It was an unpleasant idea. If the fat man was afraid of his brother, how afraid should I be?

  Maybe he was afraid of what we might find when we went inside. An even more unpleasant idea.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ Norman squeaked.

  Because I was taller, it was easier for me to look inside. I tried each pane in turn. It made no difference. There was paint or something on the inside of the glass.

  I shook my head at him and without waiting for his reaction went over to the front door. I pressed the button and the bell shrilled inside. The bow windows were shrouded in net curtains. It wasn’t a house that gave anything away.

  ‘Maybe she’s sleeping,’ Norman said.

  He reached round as if he was scratching his rump, and after a bit of effort produced a flat brown wallet. When he opened it, there were keys of different lengths hung from a bar. I recognised it. His car keys were there, and the wallet had dangled from the ignition as he drove.

  ‘You’ve got a key for the house?’ I’m not saying it was a brilliant deduction.

  ‘Why not?’ He put it into the lock. ‘Bernard has a key for my flat.’

  I wondered how Mrs Morton felt about him having a key to her house. I wished I knew where she was. I was worried about her.

  The hall was dark, the way it had been the first time. All the doors off it were closed. Norman leaned on the banister and stared down into the blackness at the foot of the spiral stair. When he went down, I went after him. He turned and looked at me but didn’t say anything. There was a little passage that led to a big room with ovens and sinks and work surfaces and cupboards and a long wooden table with chairs round it. You could see trees and flowerbeds outside. It wasn’t gloomy the way I’d imagined.

  He told me to stay where I was and went back upstairs, moving surprisingly lightly, the way some fat men do. It was his brother’s house. And I was nobody. Walking round his factory, he wouldn’t see me, I wouldn’t register, a kid pushing a dump cart. He’d every right to tell me to stay put. And I resented it like hell.

  I tried to picture the outside of the house. The ground floor
was above me, but was there one floor above that or two? If I heard her voice, I’d go up. What else could I do, even if she didn’t want me to? I stood at the foot of the stairs, straining to listen. Silence, I couldn’t hear a thing, but it was a big house. Anything could be happening. And then I got it into my head Bernard might have come home and she might be lying up there unconscious. I knew that was being stupid. A house like this, people wouldn’t behave like that, I told myself. All the same, I could see fat Norman peering in through the door of a bedroom where he’d found her lying on the floor. At once, I imagined him coming down with some excuse to get rid of me. Once I was gone, he’d climb back upstairs and crouch, panting, like he’d done in front of the filing cabinet in the office, his fat belly hanging over her.

  With my head full of what I’d imagined, I climbed the spiral stair, went along the hall and started up one slow step at a time towards the first floor until I was halfway and could see a table with a blue vase and a strip above it of a picture. A painting, I mean, like the ones in the galleries at Kelvingrove, where Tony and I sometimes went on a Saturday to look at the marine engines and the stuffed animals and room after room of paintings.

  Apart from the ticking of a clock, there wasn’t a sound, no cries for help, nothing like that. I didn’t have the nerve to go up even as far as where the painting was.

  Retreating to the dark hall, I remembered how only a couple of hours ago I’d stood here waiting for Mrs Morton to find some money to give me.

  I opened the door I’d opened then, knowing I’d see a view of the front room and a balcony looking on to trees in the garden and an arched entry through to where the books were. And just as I turned the handle and walked in, it came to me Bernard was going to be there.

  It was just as I remembered: partitions folded back; front room lit by the sun as if it was set up on a stage; the long table with a magazine laid open as if it had been put down a moment ago. I’d got it all right, except that it wasn’t Bernard at the desk inside the arch. It was Mrs Morton.