My Life as a Man

by Frederic Lindsay

  ‘In exchange for your mother’s new address.’

  ‘How did you know she had it?’

  ‘Town like this, it’s a small world.’

  She didn’t know my mother. A woman like my mother might have left for London or Timbuktu. All the same, it had to have been worth asking. Stood to reason, I should have asked. I decided perhaps Mrs Morton wanted to find my mother more than I did, and spent the journey frowning over why that might be. Did she imagine my mother would take me off her hands?

  I’d assumed she’d let me go in on my own. When I suggested it, though, she said, ‘I’m cold, I’m hungry, and I need to use the lavatory.’

  Walking up the flights of steps to the front door, I asked, ‘Are you sure this is it?’

  ‘You saw the name of the village. And this is the first house outside it. That’s what I was told.’

  I could hear she wasn’t a hundred per cent certain. After the boarding house, neither of us had anticipated anything like this. When I pressed the bell, I heard it ringing but no sound of movement in the house.

  When I thought about my mother, I remembered her in the morning, coughing, in her old purple dressing gown. Or sitting with her feet under her on the couch, picking a shred of ham from between her front teeth – she liked ham sandwiches, and I’d grill the bacon while she was cutting bread. Or making me laugh about something some fool of a man had said to her the night before. Even when I disapproved, if she set her mind to it she could make me laugh. When I gave in and did, she would join in and finish with a wide smile showing a strip of gum above big white teeth. That was how I’d always liked best to remember her.

  When she suddenly appeared in the doorway, taking me by surprise, like that, even I could see she might be a woman men would want.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.

  It wasn’t an easy thing to explain. Inside, while I tried, she kept looking from me to the door through which Mrs Morton had gone to use the lavatory. Neither of us had sat down. We hadn’t kissed or even touched.

  ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘Your landlady.’

  ‘That old cow. Did you give her money?’ My face gave me away. ‘More fool you.’

  When Mrs Morton came back, she said, ‘What a lovely house.’

  The thing is, she wasn’t just making noises for the sake of something to say. From the street, we’d looked up to the house past two steep terraces filled with low bushes and heather. Here in the front room, with not a dressing gown or half-chewed sandwich in sight, a carpet in dark swirls of red and blue ran from the doorway to the bay windows. You could have put our living room in the scheme on that carpet and had enough space left over to tuck in our old kitchen as well. The furniture was big, solid, dark; the chairs and the long couch in blue leather. On one wall there was a painting of hills behind brown fields with a wee skelf of a pale moon above it all. On another, one of a harbour with old-time sailing ships. Both of them had an artist’s name in the corner, made with strokes of a brush.

  It was a fine house, and that amazed me.

  ‘It belonged to Bobbie’s parents,’ my mother explained to – Mrs Morton, not to me. ‘Bobbie keeps asking me if I’d like to change it. For something more modern, you know.’ She looked round and made a little gesture like patting the air with her hand. ‘But I tell him I know fine he loves it, and I don’t mind one way or the other.’

  Who the fuck was Bobbie?

  After she left us, the Hairy Man and I lived in shit. Even when she was there, it hadn’t been a whole lot better. If you don’t have money, it takes an effort not to live that way. I can’t describe how strange it was now to hear her doing the homes and gardens bit. Our gracious hostess.

  Mrs Morton had that effect on her, and that must have been most of the problem. It hadn’t occurred to me till that moment how odd it would seem to her, the two of us being together. I’d wasted all those hours driving through the night when I might have thought up something plausible.

  When I explained that I was helping out because Mr Morton was my boss, my mother wasn’t in a believing mood. ‘You work for Mrs Morton’s husband?’ She thought about it. ‘Where would that be? What does he do?’

  ‘He has a factory.’

  ‘You can’t drive?’ she asked Mrs Morton, who raised her eyebrows and said nothing.

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ By that, if I meant anything, it must have been something like the rich don’t have to drive themselves, even if they can.

  My mother looked at me, then at Mrs Morton and then she got up and went to the window.

  ‘Come here,’ she said.

  I joined her in studying the view. There was a nice display of roses in the neighbour’s garden over the way. There wasn’t anybody walking on the pavements. The only car in sight was the one we’d parked on the other side of the road opposite her gate. It was a quiet street.

  ‘That car?’ she wondered. ‘He trusts you with that car?’

  From that exact instant, what she wanted was us out of there. I wish I’d gone; it would have let us think better of each other. I got stubborn, though. If I’d been asked then, I’d have said because she was my mother and I felt she should help me. Now I’d put it down to having no idea what else to do.

  As for Mrs Morton, I knew she must be tired, have a stiff neck, all the rest that must be wrong. But – you can’t always tell from the way someone looks how they feel on the inside – she appeared relaxed sitting there. She looked good, as a matter of fact, and that, of course, didn’t help.

  My mother said, ‘I have to go out now. I have an appointment.’

  Mrs Morton stood up, too. They both waited. I didn’t get up.

  ‘Who with?’ I asked.

  ‘With Bobbie.’ When she glanced at her watch, it shone gold. ‘I’m already late.’

  She went out and came back with her coat on. While she was gone, Mrs Morton didn’t say anything and I kept my eyes stubbornly on the floor.

  My mother held out an envelope. ‘This came from your father. He’s put his address on it. Here, take it. It’s no use to me.’

  It had ‘Happy Birthday’ on the front. I folded it and stuck it in my pocket. ‘What does Bobbie do?’ I asked.

  She frowned, but couldn’t resist saying, for Mrs Morton’s benefit, ‘He’s a lawyer. A partner in the firm. His grandfather started it.’

  ‘I’d like to meet him,’ I said.

  I got uncomfortable the minute she started to bite her lip; it was what she always did when she had a problem to work out. She stared down at me, chewing her lip, and then she turned and left without another word. It was only later, when the police arrived, that I understood how much she didn’t want us there when Bobbie came home. I must have made her a little desperate.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ I asked Mrs Morton.

  ‘You can’t just make yourself at home,’ she said.

  She followed me along the corridor until I found the kitchen. There was a table you could sit a family round and a mile of surfaces and pots hung in a row on the wall. She watched while I got bread and sliced it and found cheese in the larder. ‘Don’t worry,’ I told her. ‘And put the kettle on.’ I didn’t see why I should do everything by myself.

  You could say I was showing off.

  She didn’t object any more, but sat down opposite me and ate the sandwiches I made, some on cheese and one on a slice of cold meat I’d found between two plates. My mother hadn’t turned into some kind of perfect housekeeper, which was a relief. Maybe they ate out a lot. Chewing, I looked out at the garden. It was big enough to have trees in it, and grass cut so short you could have stroked it with the back of your hand. I tried to picture my mother kneeling among the neat flowerbeds, but my imagination failed me.

  ‘Why did you say you wanted to meet him, this Bobbie?’ she asked.

  ‘What?’ I gulped my tea; she made weak tea. Though I was hungry, the sandwiches were dry in my mouth.

  ‘Were you thinking may
be Bobbie didn’t even know she had a son? That maybe your mother had forgotten to mention it to him? Was that the idea?’

  ‘What idea?’

  ‘A kind of blackmail. That she wouldn’t want him to know how old she is?’

  ‘Old enough to have a son like me?’ The word ‘blackmail’ made me angry. ‘I can see she wouldn’t like that. You wouldn’t like that,’ I told her.

  No sooner were the words out of my mouth than Alice came into my mind, the child Mrs Morton had lost.

  She wet the tip of her middle finger and began to dab up crumbs from her plate. The sun shining in put a halo of light round her hair.

  Without looking up, she said, ‘It doesn’t happen all at once. You have to stop respecting yourself. It gets taken away from you in bits.’

  I knew she was telling me about sitting outside the factory in Morton’s car. She didn’t have to explain to me she was talking about that, I just knew. From the first, it had seemed so strange to me. Day after day; being so submissive to Morton. I still thought that was the most important thing about her.

  Before I could think of anything to say, the bell rang and I was glad of the excuse to get up and answer it. I assumed it was my mother, come back because she’d decided it wasn’t safe to leave me with her new belongings. There was a man on the step standing so close he was almost touching me when I opened the door. My first thought was it must be Bobbie, home early from doing whatever lawyers do; my second that Bobbie wouldn’t have to ring the bell. Then I saw the man standing behind him on the path. The man on the step was small so that I looked over his head and the man on the path was so tall I had to look up at him. I knew him at once. A big, slouching man in a crumpled blue suit, he had pursued me through the Infirmary in Glasgow.

  Before I could slam the door shut, the man on the step put his hand on my chest and pushed me back inside.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The small man had taken a seat before I recognised him. Mrs Morton was still at the kitchen table, looking bewildered. The big man in the blue suit had his arms folded, resting his weight against the wall near the door into the hall. The smaller man had taken a chair at the table without being asked, and as he jerked his thumb for me to sit down I placed him.

  There had been three men in the group Mr Bernard had shown round his factory the afternoon my fledgling career came to a full stop. One was a narrow man with gold-rimmed glasses, the second a red-faced farmer type, and the third this little swaggering man with the build of a wrestler. His gaze went from Mrs Morton to me and then to the plates and the breadboard with the sliced loaf. He took his time and we waited and when he finished he looked back at me. He had small brown eyes, not soft, but hard like little polished stones, and when he spoke the words grumbled at the back of his mouth like pebbles rattling in a bag.

  ‘Where’s your mammy?’

  ‘Gone out.’ That came in a squeak. I cleared my throat and tried for something firmer. ‘She’ll be back in a minute.’

  The threat didn’t bother him. He turned from me. ‘And you’ll be Mrs Morton. I never had the pleasure. I know your husband well.’ He scowled. ‘You could say too fucking well.’

  The swear word put me in a state of shock. I knew it, of course, and had used it since I was five in a primary school playground. My father had sworn, but not often and only when he and I were on our own. Respectable working-class women didn’t swear, and decent men didn’t swear in front of them. Even the Hairy Man hadn’t sworn much in front of my mother.

  The word was like a blow, but to my surprise Mrs Morton didn’t flinch under it. ‘I don’t know you,’ she said. ‘And even if you do know my husband, I’m sure you’ve never been to our house.’

  ‘Why would that be?’ She looked at him without answering. ‘I mean, I could have been there when you were out, or up in your bed with a headache maybe – you look like the kind who’d have a headache. What makes you so sure I could never have been in your house?’

  His voice was the same harsh grumble, and he didn’t raise it. From the corner of my eye, though, I was conscious of an alteration in the stance of the big man in the blue suit, a kind of heightened alertness, an easing of his weight off the wall. It made me think, Oh, God, you’ve made him angry, and that made me angry with her. That’s what fear does to you. I remembered my stepfather saying, ‘The wee guy was a madman,’ staring up at me from the hospital bed with his broken face.

  ‘It’s possible,’ Mrs Morton said, and I found myself nodding, but then she spoiled it: ‘But I don’t think so.’

  ‘Tell you this for nothing,’ he said. ‘I could buy and sell your fucking husband. That’s why I’m here.’ He gave a sneer that included me and the house around us. ‘And throw in whoever the boy’s whore of a mother’s got herself as a fancy man.’

  ‘Oh, really!’ On the exclamation of disgust, Mrs Morton stood up, but as she moved to leave the kitchen the man in the blue suit, still leaning against the wall, without looking at her or saying a word, put an arm across the doorway and barred her way. When she came back and sat down, her expression was different and she seemed smaller, as if she had only now understood how badly this might end.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked.

  ‘Either you know or your man’s lied to me.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ She glanced at me. ‘Neither of us does.’ She was trying to protect me.

  He went on as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘If that poncey shite’s lied to me, there’s a problem. I might have to kill him.’ He looked round at the big man. ‘That not right?’

  He smiled as if he was making a joke, but the big man stared back at him. It would have been nice to imagine he was waiting for the punch line. On the other hand, it might be he felt the answer was obvious.

  The small man shook his head. ‘I looked all over Glasgow for you two, sonny, and you’ve been here all the time, staying with your mammy. What room did she put you in?’

  ‘How do you mean, room? We don’t . . . What room? I mean, there isn’t . . . There isn’t a room.’ The strange thing was that it wasn’t fear for myself or Mrs Morton that made me babble. It was fear that in coming here I’d put my mother in danger from this terrifying little man.

  ‘The one she put you in, either by yourself or’ – he jerked a thumb at Mrs Morton – ‘with her. Putting the two of you in the one bed wouldn’t bother your mother, eh? From what I hear, she’s an easy bitch.’

  And with those words I knew, not who he was or why he had come here or his connection to Mr Bernard, but how he’d found us. I’d heard Alec Turner sneer about my mother too often not to know where that ‘easy bitch’ came from. I remembered him in the hospital whispering through his broken mouth that he’d tried to placate his tormentors by telling them he wasn’t my father. Of course, after that he must have told them about my mother, everything he knew, including the last address he had for her. These two must have followed the same trail as us from the boarding house to here. What a fool I’d been.

  Mrs Morton said, ‘We haven’t slept in this house at all, and we certainly haven’t slept together here or anywhere.’

  It was as if she hadn’t been listening. I didn’t think the little man was here as a messenger from Mr Bernard. Whatever he wanted, it was for himself. Why would he care whether we’d shared a bedroom?

  ‘Where have you been, then?’ He frowned at us. ‘If you haven’t been here, where the hell have you been the last two nights?’

  Messenger or not, I hoped she wouldn’t say one night in a car and the other in a hotel room; together and asleep.

  She said the next worst thing. ‘What business is that of yours?’

  Instead of exploding, he turned to the man against the wall. ‘What business is it of mine? What business is it of mine?’ He started laughing, rattling the pebbles hard, the unfunniest sound in the world. ‘What fucking business is it of mine? You’re either smart or helluva stupid, sweetheart. Which is it?’ What answer could she ma
ke to that? Certainly, sitting there too frightened to draw a full breath, I was no help to her. ‘Oh, don’t worry, it’s my business, it’s my own business I’m here on. Where’s your stuff?’

  Again I had no answer. The sudden change of direction left me baffled.

  ‘Clothes, do you mean?’ Mrs Morton asked. ‘I brought some with me from the house. Does Bernard grudge me that? My own clothes?’

  ‘They’re in the car,’ I said. ‘We just got here. They’re still in the car.’

  He stood up and said to Mrs Morton, ‘Let’s go and have a look.’

  ‘I didn’t take anything but clothes,’ she said indignantly. ‘And . . . a little money.’

  ‘Show me.’ He pointed at me. ‘Not you.’ I sat down again.

  She picked up her handbag and the two of them went out. When I heard the front door close behind them, I stood up at once as if the sound had been a signal. ‘I’m going, too,’ I said. She had tried to protect me. I was ashamed of myself. I started for the door.

  The big man said, ‘Be a pleasure to give you a tanking, son.’ He put out his hand and covered my chest with it. ‘Just give me an excuse. See, when we were at the hospital I took a right scunner at you.’

  ‘I just want to make sure she’s all right.’

  I didn’t have the courage to step round him, and we stood like that till his eyes lost focus and he frowned to himself. To my surprise, he took his hand away.

  ‘We can have a look out the front window,’ he said.

  As I followed him through the hall, the only thing I could think of was that he was curious about what was happening; or else he wanted to check that his boss hadn’t driven away without him.

  When we went into the front room, I went straight to the window from which my mother and I had looked out. Mrs Morton’s car was still there, but two men in uniform were getting out of a police car, which had pulled up in front of it. Mrs Morton was straightening up from the boot. The lid was still down, so she must have been about to unlock it. Her companion stepped back as the two policemen came round the car to them.