My Life as a Man

by Frederic Lindsay

  I just had time to register all of this, when something that had to be a fist the size and density of a wooden club struck me on the side of the head.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  ‘This is some car,’ the constable who rode with us to the station had said.

  The desk sergeant, though, was the genuine article of an enthusiast. He came out to the pavement to take a look at it. ‘You could do well over eighty in that very comfortably. Not that I’d advise you to.’

  ‘Because it’s against the law,’ I said, feeling better now we were out in the open air again.

  ‘And we don’t have the roads for it,’ he said.

  He showed no sign of moving. They’d contacted Morton in Glasgow and were – reluctantly, I felt – letting us go. Mrs Morton had already got in on the passenger side and I just wanted to climb in and get away from there.

  ‘The lady’s husband is expecting you back. And that’s where you’re going. Right?’

  I nodded.

  He studied me for what felt like a long time. He had thinning red hair and lashes so pale you could hardly see them. When he opened his mouth, I thought he was going to threaten me. ‘The gentleman in question wanted you held till he got here. I explained to him that we had no reason to do that. He wasn’t pleased. I asked him about those other two, as well.’

  ‘What did he say?’ I asked before I could stop myself.

  ‘He had no idea who they might be, just like the lady and yourself. And I’m told they weren’t questioned. They got into their car and drove away. They should have been questioned.’

  To be fair to the two constables, the sergeant hadn’t seen the size of the man in the blue suit. When I came to, alone on the living-room floor, I’d staggered outside, clutching my ear. The little wrestler had taken one look, clutched the sleeve of the big man as he crossed the road ahead of me and pulled him towards their car. In an instant they were off.

  ‘At that point,’ the sergeant said, ‘Mr Morton hung up on me.’ And he stopped again, as if he might say more but was thinking about it, blinking at me with those pale lashes. ‘I was wondering if your mother would have any idea who those two were – not that I’ll be asking her again.’ I remembered that Bobbie was a lawyer. ‘I was in the middle of a sentence when the man Morton put the phone down. I thought that was rude. Hard to tell what was going on.’

  After a bit, I asked, ‘All right if we get off now?’

  I was round the car and halfway in, when he said, ‘You’re just a laddie, a silly one, maybe. You should be careful.’

  I crashed the gears pulling away and watched him dwindle in the mirror. He stood watching us until we turned the first corner.

  I tried to make a story of it for Mrs Morton. The way I told it, the big Heilanman doing the daddy bit, it might have struck a listener as funny.

  Slumped down, she didn’t seem as if anything would make her smile ever again. The afternoon had turned dark-skied. The ocean she was staring at, if she saw it at all, spread to the horizon cold and grey.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked, straightening up.

  I hadn’t thought about it. Back to Glasgow? The game was up. Presumably, Mr Bernard could protect his wife. I couldn’t.

  And suddenly I was angry with her again. It was as if I couldn’t help myself.

  ‘Tell you what, I’ve an idea,’ I said. ‘Let’s go back and ask my mother what made her think the car was stolen.’

  ‘Is that why she phoned the police?’ she asked dully.

  ‘What else was all that about?’ I felt Mrs Morton could have told the police I might not look like much of a chauffeur, but who she got to drive her car wasn’t any of their business. She could have told them something – anything – instead of sitting with her head down, lost in a dream. ‘All right, forget my mother. Let’s go back to Glasgow. After all, your husband’s expecting us.’

  A bad dream: mention of her husband had been the touch that turned her to ice.

  When she told me to stop, I stamped on the brakes, jerking her forward, and pulled in at the side of the road.

  Without a word, she got out, came round and opened my door. ‘I’ll drive,’ she said.

  ‘Do whatever you like.’

  It’s your fucking car, I thought.

  Even on a main road there were quiet times. She spun the car across the road, misjudged and hit the opposite pavement, put it into reverse and then we were heading back the way we’d come.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘This won’t take us to Glasgow. We have to go back.’

  Wherever she thought we were going, she must have taken a wrong turning for we finished up at the harbour. We sat staring at the boats packed tight as herring in a box. When I wound down the window, you could smell fish and oil, with the tang of salt behind it. A group of men were standing close enough to touch the car, but when I tried to overhear, the language pouring out of them was strange to me – Norwegian or Gaelic, maybe, or just the way they spoke in Aberdeen, fast and guttural.

  ‘What were they looking for?’ I asked.

  ‘He didn’t say.’

  ‘But he told you to open the boot?’

  ‘And then the police came.’

  I wound up the window and the men’s voices faded.

  ‘The only thing I can think of,’ I said, ‘is the small case.’

  ‘The one we took into the hotel?’ She frowned at me. ‘The one I couldn’t open?’

  I nodded. ‘I know where it came from. When we were sitting in the police station, it came back to me. Just before I came out of the factory and drove the car away, did your husband’s secretary come out and put something in the boot?’

  She stared at me. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I was there when he told her to do it.’

  ‘If the case is Bernard’s, what interest could that awful little man have in it?’ But then she went on at once; whatever you said about her, she wasn’t stupid: ‘Unless it really belongs to him?’

  ‘And, for some reason, he gave it to’ – I stumbled over the next bit, almost said ‘Mr Bernard’ – ‘your husband.’

  I told her what the sergeant had said about Mr Bernard Morton denying all knowledge of the men who’d pushed their way into my mother’s house, and then I described how he’d shown the three men round the factory. Even then the one I thought of as the little gangster looked as if he came from a different world from the man in the gold-rimmed glasses and the red-faced farmer. She didn’t say anything. I watched gulls swoop and curve above the boats.

  ‘Don’t you remember her coming out to the car?’ I asked after a while, for the sake of something to say. ‘That secretary, when she put the case in the boot?’

  She looked at me blankly, and then with an odd defiance. ‘Whenever she appeared, I ignored her. I tried to ignore all of them.’

  Instead of saying something to show I understood, I sat in silence, staring at the gulls. Two of them squabbled at the edge of the pier, wings spread and beaks gaping. If I wound the window down, I wondered, would they sound like Aberdonians?

  ‘If we’re not going to my mother’s, where are we going?’

  ‘Not to Glasgow,’ she said. ‘Those two will be waiting for us on that road.’

  That made an awful kind of sense.

  ‘They can’t be sure we’ll go that way,’ I said slowly.

  ‘Where else is there for us to go? Isn’t that what you thought?’ And when I didn’t answer, she added, ‘That’s how they’ll see it, too.’

  I wiped the cloud of my breath from the windscreen. Rubbing back and forward, I said, ‘We could give them the case. If that’s what they want, why not give it to them?’

  ‘And then?’

  I shrugged. ‘Go back.’

  ‘Back to Bernard?’

  The silence went on for a time, and then she started the car. We reversed out of there and retraced the way we’d come. What did she want me to s
ay? That I was sorry for taking her from her husband? I was sorry.

  I wasn’t used to following routes and so I sat there waiting for the sea to appear again on our left and wondering what the two men would do if we offered them the case. Maybe we should stop and get it out of the boot so that it was ready to hand over. I had a vision of them walking towards the car like highway cops in a B-movie and me throwing it out of the window and us driving away so fast they’d never catch up. As I was thinking about that, we passed a signpost. It took a moment to register. It didn’t say Glasgow. It said Inverness. I twisted my head round to make sure, but we were past it. I must have made some kind of noise in protest, for without looking at me Mrs Morton said, ‘Maybe it’s not about the case. Not for Bernard.’

  What, then? I almost said that. The other possibility, though, was the obvious one. Driving off with a wife might be calculated to annoy most men.

  ‘You think he’s angry about the car?’ I asked. That sense of humour will get you in trouble, the Hairy Man had often told me. However I’d got into this mess, some of it, it seemed to me at that point, had to be her fault.

  She swung a look at me, sharp and hard. It felt to me full of anger or even contempt, but later I thought it might have been the first time I was not just a boy to her but someone she would take account of. After that the best thing was to keep quiet, and I did for a long time.

  I didn’t know anything about Inverness, except that it was in the north – ‘Gateway to the Highlands’, advertisements called it – and it had a loch with a monster in it. I read road signs pointing off to the right: Portsoy, Cullen, Portknockie, Findochty. Port this and Port that, the sea must be somewhere in that direction.

  We came into Elgin and I spat out a joke I’d heard somewhere, maybe in a school playground. ‘You know what they call a sheep tied to a lamppost in Elgin? A recreation centre.’ It had been set somewhere else when I heard it, but to a city boy one small town is like another and jokes are adapted like that all the time.

  ‘Don’t tell me this isn’t better,’ I bawled at her, a smart guy talking to the deaf.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Seeing the countryside. Don’t tell me it isn’t better.’ This time I said it in an ordinary voice.

  ‘Better than what?’

  ‘Better than sitting outside a factory all day.’

  ‘You don’t have to hate me,’ she said. ‘I’m not your mother.’

  After that we didn’t talk.

  I don’t know how often I heard her sigh before I glanced at her and saw how pale she was. The light was fading on the fields.

  I said, ‘We should look for somewhere to stop. I think you’re tired.’

  ‘This road seems endless.’

  ‘If you want, I’ll drive.’

  But then the road gave us a glimpse of the sea and we were at the edge of another small town and she turned into a gravelled space in front of what looked like more than a large house. She booked two rooms and the landlord took us for a mother and son. He cooked for us, but I was so busy watching her I didn’t pay much attention to the meal.

  Afterwards, when I brought in the cases from the car, the landlord leaned out of the kitchen door and said, ‘Your mother’s gone upstairs. Is she well enough? She hardly touched her supper.’

  ‘We did a bit too much travelling. She’ll be fine in the morning.’

  I told him we’d be going south the next day, towards Aberdeen. It was a stupid lie, but I’d begun to think like a fugitive and lies are what fugitives tell. At that, he told me we should take the coast road: Lossiemouth, Portgordon, Findochty, Portknockie, Cullen, Portsoy, Banff and Macduff. Lovely views, he said. They’d cheer my mother up.

  There were two rooms on the left of the upstairs corridor. She was in the first one. When I knocked and took in the cases, she was lying fully clothed on the bed. What surprised me was that she hadn’t taken her shoes off.

  I dumped the big case on a stand by the wardrobe. She opened her eyes as I set the small case on a chair, and asked, ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘It’s locked.’ I pushed at the catches. They were square and looked like brass. The case itself was made of heavy leather and every corner was clasped with the same brass-coloured metal. ‘If I had a knife,’ I speculated. ‘Maybe they’d lend us one downstairs.’

  She sat up with a groan and swung her legs round so that she sat on the edge of the bed. ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’

  I stared at her. It seemed so obvious to me. ‘We need to know what’s in it.’

  ‘Why?’ When I couldn’t think of anything to say, she repeated herself, ‘Why do we?’

  ‘Because they’re after us and we don’t know why. Because we should know what’s in it.’ I pushed at the catches. Because I was curious. But how could I say that to her? Maybe that went with being young.

  ‘Leave it alone,’ she said sharply. ‘It doesn’t belong to you.’

  Something in her tone made me blind with anger. ‘Fine,’ I said, and I stormed out.

  I had just enough sense not to slam the door behind me, but I shut the one into my room with a bang. Before I could do more than take off my jersey, there was a knock at the door.

  It was only the landlord. ‘Your mother asleep?’

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘Well, I was thinking, if she’s still under the weather in the morning, come down and tell me. I’ll make up a tray for her and you can take it up. She can have it in her bed.’

  ‘She’ll be all right, I’m sure she will, after a sleep.’ I couldn’t imagine what would happen to us if she was ill.

  ‘Well, just in case. It would be a shame if her trip was spoiled. Weather’s fine, you’ll enjoy the run. See, if you have the time, take a wee detour to Portessie. They’re quaint places those fishing villages. If your mother’s all right in the morning, I’m sure she’d enjoy them. And it looks as if the weather’s going to hold for a few days yet.’

  He said goodnight and that he would see us both in the morning. I watched him to the end of the corridor, trying to make up my mind, then went and tapped at her door. There was no response. I thought she might be in bed or even asleep. Either way, she was all right, she wasn’t ill. I told myself I was a fool and was turning away when I heard her calling from inside.

  When I went in, her eyes were wide as if she might have just wakened, but she was still fully dressed though she was lying on the bed. She had a flush of red on each cheek.

  ‘The man knocked my door. He says if you’re not feeling well in the morning you can have your breakfast up here.’

  ‘How nice of him,’ she said. ‘That’s not usual.’

  When she smiled I saw that she was pretty, and it occurred to me that that might be why the landlord was being so nice. I didn’t know why I hadn’t seen it before.

  ‘I was being stupid about the case,’ I said. ‘I know it’s not mine.’

  ‘It’s not mine, either,’ she said. ‘There could be anything in it. Correspondence he wouldn’t want anyone else to see. Contracts, maybe.’

  It was still on the chair. We both looked at it.

  ‘Private stuff. I understand.’

  She shook her head. ‘No, not like that. Not because it isn’t yours, or even mine. What I meant was that it would be safer not to look in it.’

  ‘Safer?’

  ‘Maybe that’s not the right word.’ She shook her head as if to disclaim it.

  ‘I have to sleep,’ she said, and her eyes closed, flickered open, not seeing me, and closed again.

  I stood there for what seemed a long time and then went quietly out of the room.

  BOOK THREE

  August and Beate

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  When you are eighteen, appetite turns easily to hunger. My mother used to say, ‘My belly thinks my throat’s been cut.’ That’s how hungry I was.

  ‘My belly thinks my throat’s been cut,’ I said.

  She waited so long I thought she di
dn’t understand and I was about to explain when she said, ‘You’re a growing boy,’ and went back to staring out of the window at the fields going by.

  Never mind me, I was worried about her. She’d come down though the landlord had offered her breakfast in bed, but she hadn’t really eaten, just picked at the edges of an egg and pushed her plate away. He was concerned enough to come out to the front door and see us off. In the rear mirror, I watched him step out into the road and half raise an arm, as if trying to tell us we had set off in the wrong direction, heading north not south.

  When we got to Inverness, she was asleep, sitting over against the door with her head resting on her hand, so that it seemed a shame to waken her. With a vague idea she’d feel better if she could sleep, like a fool I drove on.

  The bother was I couldn’t find anywhere to eat. Places I saw signposted might be only villages, or three houses at the end of a farm track, for all I knew. With every mile we were climbing higher, and now mountains that had a brown, sear look even in March were rising up high and stark ahead of us. At the sight of them the road felt suddenly narrower, not one that seemed likely to take us anywhere in particular. Just then, I saw an opening on the right and had the impression of a descending landscape with a suggestion of buildings tucked among gently rolling folds.

  ‘What are you doing?’ She’d come out of her trance.

  ‘One road’s as good as another,’ I said.

  She sighed. The minute she did, I understood how stupid and depressing an answer it was. Fine, let her feel like that; we could starve to death, for all I cared.

  Pretty soon I felt even stupider as the road turned into a single-lane one with passing places. The only thing was to give in and retrace the way we’d come. At the first likely-looking farm gate, I slammed to a halt and flew back in reverse. The car hit something, I braked and accelerated at the same time and everything went quiet as the engine stopped.

  I got out. The back bumper was dented round a post of splintered wood.