My Life as a Man

by Frederic Lindsay

  ‘Fill her up. Please.’

  The pump wheezed like an asthmatic and I imagined the hiss of petrol falling into the tank.

  ‘Is there a Gents?’ I asked.

  ‘Sorry.’ He stood with one shoulder lower than the other, staring down at the nozzle in his hand.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ I said mournfully.

  He gave me a considering look as if assessing my need.

  ‘There’s one in the shop. Not for the public. Tell the girl I said it was all right.’

  It was a narrow cubicle beside the storeroom. It smelled of cigarettes and disinfectant. I unzipped and stood over the bowl. Unlike the pump nozzle nothing flowed. I put my cock away again and went out into the shop.

  The man was back serving behind the counter. As he reached up to get a packet of cereal from the shelf, I walked out of the shop. The girl who had told me where the lavatory was smiled and nodded as I went past. Presumably, it didn’t occur to her that I hadn’t paid.

  The car was sitting at the pump. I got in and drove away.

  It had been kind of the man to let me use the shop toilet.

  As I’d overheard August say to Beate that morning, Good deeds can have bad consequences.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The smell wasn’t pleasant. Close up, it made its individual contribution to the general background of smells that had filled my nose the moment I went through the entrance. It came from a man with two dead flies caught in his hair, who was mopping the entrance hall. He must have seen the direction of my glance for he swiped a hand through his hair dislodging one fly and missing the other. He pointed above his left shoulder and I saw a thickly encrusted flypaper. ‘You’ve to be careful,’ he said. ‘They hang them all over the place.’

  It was hard to tell his age; somewhere between fifty and a hundred; a wizened man who had seen too much. It was disconcerting to have him look at me with contempt.

  ‘Tommy? You’re Tommy Glass’s son?’ He wiped a hand down his mouth in the rubbing gesture of an alcoholic. ‘You ever hear of Hart Danks? Naw? Well, I’ve heard of him. He wrote “Silver Threads among the Gold” – about his mother. A great fucking wee song. And he died in a rooming hoose in New York. You know what the note he left said?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘ “It’s hard to die alone.” Right? And your father’s not here, by the way.’

  ‘I was told he was.’

  ‘Oh, he was. I said he’s not now. He’s in the hospital.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Nae idea. But I asked after him. He’s in a hell of a bad way.’

  He took me by the arm and drew me after him down the corridor into a room not much larger than a cubicle, which I tried hard not to see properly.

  ‘I wisnae there when he keeled over. Went out for a pie and he was away in the ambulance by the time I got back. Soon as I heard, I got this before some bastard nicked it.’ He pulled a cardboard shoebox from under the bed. ‘If you’re his son, you should have it. If you want it, that is?’

  Maybe he suspected I’d refuse and confirm his poor opinion of me. Instead, I tucked it under my arm.

  ‘He didn’t have much to say for himself, but he talked to me. He was in the army, you ken?’

  I nodded.

  ‘He was in a reserved occupation, tae.’

  ‘Working a forklift on the docks.’ I remembered.

  ‘Like I said, he didnae have to go. His missus stayed out half the night with some bloke so the bloody fool packed it in and got called up. Finished up in the Sappers. He got tae France on D-Day plus three, he said. But no for long. He stood on a shrapnel mine in a back alley in Cannes and they shipped him back home. Finished up at a convalescent camp in Stoke-on-Trent.’

  ‘I didn’t know any of that.’

  ‘Like I say, he talked to me. We used to have some great arguments.’

  He trailed after me through the hall.

  Outside I clutched the box under my arm and hovered, wanting to escape.

  ‘Maybe you should know Tommy’s all for being cremated. I’ll tell you something he said to me one time. He said, “If there is a God, his heid’ll fall off wi shaking it at human stupidity.” ’ He gave me a final glance of dislike and went back inside.

  The young doctor at the hospital didn’t think much of me, either. It was, apparently, six weeks since my father’s stroke.

  ‘Although,’ the doctor said, ‘the likely thing is that he’d had a series of pinprick strokes before that.’

  When they brought him in, things had been complicated by the fact he was suffering from malnutrition and tuberculosis.

  I stood at the end of the bed, trying to match this stranger against a memory. He was a skeletal man, who had been a lean man. A still man, who had never been still except with a book in his hand.

  Because I was hungry, I went to the canteen. I bought a bacon roll and a cup of tea from the volunteer woman, and then found I had no appetite. After one bite, I pushed the roll aside, sat the shoebox on the table and took off the lid. There was nothing in it, just rubbish. Not a diary or a letter or a last will and testament, not even a postcard. He’d used it for storing newspaper clippings. At a cursory glance, there was no rhyme or reason to the collection. When I had time, I would go through it and try to understand why he might have chosen these things. I unfolded the birthday card my mother had given me, on which my father had written his address, and laid it on top of the cuttings and put the lid back on the box. It was possible he had sent the card as a cry for help. If so, no one had come to his rescue, no knight in shining armour. I sipped the tea and listened to the clatter of cups and voices, music from a wireless, the clatter of a dropped plate.

  When I went back he was dead. ‘Without recovering consciousness’, as they say. No one had thought to come and look for me.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The secretary’s eyes rested on me a moment and then widened. In the instant before she recognised me, she had the same air of indifference and self-possession that had irritated and impressed me on my first day at the factory. In those widened eyes, I saw alarm and excitement.

  ‘My name’s Harry Glass.’

  ‘I know who you are.’

  I tried, but couldn’t remember her name.

  ‘Did he get you?’ she asked. ‘The . . . the man who phoned here after you left asking for your address?’

  Remembering the little wrestler threatening me in my mother’s house, I nodded. ‘Not right away, but he found me,’ I said.

  ‘He’s dead,’ she said. ‘Is that why you’ve come back?’

  ‘Mr Bernard’s dead?’ I stared at her in shock.

  ‘Of course not.’ That came out with the old arrogance, and I remembered that her name was Theresa. ‘Mr Shea. He was a business acquaintance of Mr Bernard’s.’

  ‘The man who wanted my address?’

  She nodded.

  The little Glasgow gangster.

  ‘He’s dead?’

  ‘It was in the papers.’ She studied me and I could see her thinking. ‘You didn’t see it? I thought that’s why you’d come back.’

  I wondered how much she knew or guessed of Morton’s business.

  ‘I want to speak to Mr Bernard,’ I said.

  She licked her lips. ‘Is she with you?’

  She meant Eileen. Something in her tone brought a vivid image of that tight behind waggling for Bernard Morton. As surely as if I’d seen them, I knew she’d been bedded by Morton. Perhaps his wife’s disappearance had given her hope of becoming wife number two. It took me by surprise how much I was offended by her calling Eileen ‘she’.

  Heading for the stairs, I said over my shoulder, ‘Mrs Morton isn’t with me.’

  She came after me in a clacking of heels, brushed past and led the way. As we passed the first door on the landing, I glanced inside, half expecting to see the fat older brother on his haunches in front of the filing cabinet. The room was empty.

  She knocked and in the same
movement opened the door.

  In a voice husky with excitement, she said, ‘Someone to see you.’

  Morton was behind his desk with a pile of papers in front of him. He glanced at me and then said to her, ‘Get out!’

  She made an odd clicking in her throat and hung in place as if suspended on a hook for a long helpless moment.

  As the door closed behind her, he capped the pen he’d been using. From the moment I appeared he hadn’t taken his eyes from me.

  ‘Have you been doing the hokey-cokey with my wife?’ he asked, his voice quiet and reasonable.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know. You put your middle leg in, You take your middle leg out, You put your middle leg in, And you shake it all about.’

  What answer was there to that? I could only think of one.

  ‘I found the money,’ I said.

  ‘Where is she?’ He looked at the door as if expecting her to appear.

  ‘Where the money is.’

  ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘we should go and see Norman.’

  He put his closed fists on the desk and levered himself up, never taking his eyes from my face. It came over me with a chill how little the money concerned him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Bernard’s home in Giffnock, an old solid house of stone, had been his father’s and maybe his grandfather’s. I don’t know why it had gone to him, the younger son. Maybe because he was married, and it had appeared as if Norman would never marry. That could have been their father’s way of marking his disappointment.

  Anyway, when we left the factory it was for the other side of the city from Giffnock. I tried to talk to Morton in the car, but he shut me up. After that, I sat and watched the trees and terraces of Great Western Road flicker past. Off the main road, we went by an allotment with sheds and a glimpse of turned earth and overgrown rhubarb. It looked neglected, as if there was no need any more to dig for victory. Just beyond it, Morton pulled into the visitors’ parking area in front of a block of flats. There was grass in front, so new you could still see the lines where the turf had been laid, and low bushes and a few straggling lanky trees.

  The hall was carpeted just as if it was the entry to a private house, and there were plants in big pots by the lift that took us in a silent rush up to the sixth floor. When its door slid back, I saw fat Norman the bookkeeper waiting for us. Since his was the only entrance, I understood his flat must take up the whole floor.

  ‘I didn’t believe it,’ he said, patting his lips as he looked at me.

  Bernard grunted and, putting his hand in the small of my back, urged me out of the lift. The mild, insistent pressure disconcerted me like sudden heat from the folding back of a furnace door.

  One brother in front, the other almost tramping on my heels, I went into a room that stretched to French windows at the far end. Without a word to me, the two brothers went outside. Apart from films, I’d hardly ever seen the inside of a room with a balcony.

  Because the glass doors had been slid shut, I couldn’t hear a word, but they were leaning close, faces inches apart; it looked like an argument. To my surprise, Norman was doing most of the talking. When he turned his head to stare at me, I beat a retreat back into the middle of the room. The long walls on either side were lined with paintings, big and small, twenty or more of them. For an unreal moment I felt like a schoolboy again and saw Miss McAlester, not much more than a girl herself, throat flushing as she herded us through the art gallery at Kelvingrove. It only lasted for a moment, but it was very vivid, a kind of displacement, I suppose, for the fear I was in.

  Next moment, the glass door was pushed open.

  Norman came in ahead of his brother. He held himself differently from the man I’d met before. Even his voice was different. His asthmatic wheezing now sounded in my ears like the panting of an animal. Whatever had happened, he wasn’t apologising any more for his existence.

  ‘Don’t stand there,’ he said.

  My heart juddered.

  He took a moment as if savouring my bewilderment.

  ‘It took me a long time to get that clean,’ he said.

  I was standing almost in the middle of a roughly shaped circle. It made a patch of lightness on the dark blue of the carpet as if it had been soaked and bleached and scrubbed.

  ‘For God’s sake, Norman,’ his brother said.

  ‘I’m just asking him to move.’

  Not knowing why, I stepped to the side. Getting off the circle put me hard against the couch.

  ‘Don’t sit down there,’ Norman said. ‘I had to clean that as well.’

  On the blue leather, I saw similar faded patches. For some reason, as I raised my eyes they settled on the painting hung above the couch. It showed an old man cradling a dog, but the dog had the face of a man and the man the grey muzzle of a dog.

  Norman came to my side. For a big man, he moved quickly.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ he said. ‘How did I miss those?’

  The glass of the painting was covered with dark brown flecks.

  Instead of complaining again Bernard crossed to stand on the other side of me.

  ‘Fuck!’ His voice was just above a whisper, and I was alarmed to see that his face had gone grey.

  ‘That would be the mot juste,’ Norman said cheerfully.

  Bernard turned away and sat down. He sank forward, head in his hands. ‘I shouldn’t have brought him here,’ he said.

  Norman had one knee on the couch and was leaning forward to pick delicately with his thumbnail at one of the flecks on the glass. ‘I wouldn’t have believed it. I love Colquhoun. And over there’s a MacBryde. Such dear friends, I thought it would be nice to let them face one another. And I simply didn’t see these.’ Scratching at the last trace of the fleck. ‘It shows that you should move paintings around or you stop seeing them, even the ones you love.’

  With a sigh, he wriggled his bulk round and settled on the couch. I was left standing between the two brothers.

  ‘You’ve caused more trouble than you could imagine,’ Norman said.

  ‘None of it was—’

  ‘Eileen’s fault? So why isn’t she here with you?’

  That took a long time to explain. I told them everything I could think of, except what the old crofter had told me about August’s real name and his relationship to Beate. When I was confused, Norman would ask one question and then another until things were clear to him. Bernard’s head came up but he didn’t say anything. Only, as I went on, the grey in his cheeks was replaced by a flush of blood.

  ‘So you left the poor man,’ Norman said at last, ‘with nothing to show for his morning but a bag of pastries. Unless, of course, he ate them as he walked home.’ He shook his head at me. ‘You have a weakness for stealing cars.’

  Incongruously, I thought of August’s car left behind in the yard at the factory; biscuits, jam, marmalade and half a dozen bars of fudge in the boot. And something else, besides: the box of newspaper clippings. If they held a clue as to who my father had been and what he had made of the world, they were gone. I didn’t suppose I would ever see them again.

  ‘You dirty little bastard,’ Bernard said. They were his first words in half an hour. ‘You ran away and left her.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Before Norman insisted that we stop for something to eat, I sat in the back of the car on my own. That first part of the journey passed mostly in silence. It was as if the brothers, having decided to ignore me, had nothing to say to each other. As for me, I had done all I could and everything was out of my hands. My eyelids kept closing and I had difficulty staying awake. In a strange way, I was at peace with myself. It wasn’t true that I had run away, for I was going back. I hadn’t deserted Eileen. I’d done the only thing I could think of to bring her help. I’d told Bernard that Beate wouldn’t let August hurt her, and I believed that. Whatever happened to her now, and to me, would be decided by others.

  Tired of Norman’s complaining of hunger, Bernard stopped abru
ptly as we ran through a small town.

  ‘Where’s this?’ I asked in the car park of the hotel, and Norman grunted, ‘Pitlochry.’

  He had mutton broth, then a steak pie, pushing aside the vegetables and asking for more potatoes to add to the half-dozen already on the plate; afterwards he crammed in a pudding. Watching him sweat, chins quivering as he shovelled it in, made me feel sick, but didn’t stop me finishing a plate of haddock and chips. As for Bernard, he emptied a pot of coffee while he waited for us, and had a brandy with each of his last two cups.

  In the middle of his meal, spraying flecks of pastry as he spoke, Norman assured me suddenly, ‘You did the right thing.’

  What could I say in reply that wouldn’t be ridiculous? I hope so?

  ‘You got in over your head, and now you want to make everything all right again. I understand that.’

  Gloomy Bernard pushed away his plate of uneaten food.

  ‘And that’s how it’s going to be,’ Norman said. ‘Eileen’s had her fling and we’ll take her home. It’ll be as if it never happened. She’s been strange for a long time.’

  Staring at the table, Bernard said, ‘She lost a child.’

  ‘Alice,’ I said.

  When he glanced up, I saw that he hated me, but his head went down again so quickly it wasn’t hard to think I might be mistaken. ‘After the child died, she blamed herself and wanted to be punished. If I punished her, it was what she wanted.’

  ‘She didn’t need that,’ I blurted. I alarmed myself, but as much out of shame as courage went on, ‘Whatever she needed, she didn’t need that.’

  ‘A boy . . . How would you understand?’

  ‘It’s not difficult. All it would take is to be a decent human being.’

  ‘She tried to commit suicide. More than once. I kept her where I could keep an eye on her.’

  ‘Everything just as it was before,’ Norman said. I saw the dark wad of food churning in his open mouth as he chewed. ‘Except that I don’t think we could see our way to giving you your old job back.’ He giggled. ‘Sorry.’