My Life as a Man

by Frederic Lindsay

  I hadn’t thought any of it through properly. I’d wanted to make Eileen safe, and I couldn’t do that by myself. But if I’d gone to the police, what could I have told them? That we’d stolen money and a man who had given us shelter might or might not have seen it? But if I arrived with the Morton brothers, August couldn’t do anything against three of us. That was the way my mind had worked. Now, as the muddle cleared, I asked myself the obvious question.

  If they drove away with Eileen, what would happen to me?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  When we left the hotel, Norman came into the back seat beside me. God knows why. Because Bernard was so silent? Because he wanted to taunt his brother? Because he sensed how unpleasant it was for me to be close to him? He came in beside me for one of those reasons, or for some other I didn’t even want to think about. From time to time, his leg brushed against mine, and there was no escape from the greasy warmth of his breath. There was a darkness in him. I had discovered that; too late, perhaps.

  When I couldn’t stand the silence any longer, I said, ‘August is a dangerous man. I don’t know if I made that clear.’

  What was I doing? Asking that they wouldn’t go off and leave me with him? Was I pleading? I gathered the scraps of my pride around me and closed my mouth tight.

  ‘It had better still be there,’ Norman said.

  It took me a moment to realise he was talking about the money.

  ‘Where did it come from?’ If I was going to get hurt because of it, why shouldn’t I know?

  At first I thought he wasn’t going to answer, but then he said, ‘It was Mr Shea’s money.’

  ‘How could it be?’ I had thought of him as a little street thug, someone you hired.

  ‘Who says crime doesn’t pay?’

  Cutting across Norman’s high-pitched giggle, Bernard snarled over his shoulder, ‘Leave it!’

  Norman, however, was in no mood for taking orders.

  ‘Certainly I wouldn’t know where that money of his came from – best not to know.’ He paused an instant as if inviting a protest, but Bernard had sunk back into silence. ‘Bernard met him first through a mutual acquaintance. He was interested in politics, would you believe? And even more against trade unions and all that sort of thing than my brother is. The two of them did some things together, and I was informed but not entirely involved.’ The same giggle burst from him, an overspilling of some mysterious source of high spirits.

  ‘Anyway, when the big thing came along, we were, you could say, overstretched. Out of our depth, more or less. Put it this way, we didn’t have what was needed to pull the last lever we needed to pull. And there he was, ready to help, for a not entirely fair share of the rewards. Mr Shea and his case of money. It had to be ready cash, the gentleman we were dealing with insisted on that. He’d been out in Kenya governing the niggers for so long he’d got into their way of doing business. But when he saw the money, he refused to take the case! It seems Mr Shea kept his money in the Clydesdale Bank.’ He tapped me on the arm, ‘You understand? Clydesdale Bank notes offered to an English gentleman. He thought Shea had printed them himself. To be fair – it’s important to be fair, isn’t it? – Bernard was magnificent at calming things down. He promised the notes would be exchanged for Bank of England notes. The gentleman was placated – not difficult since he didn’t want to lose his bribe. The only thing he insisted on was that Bernard make the exchange. And Shea let my brother have the case to complete the transaction. It shows how an English gentleman taking a high line can upset the Sheas of this world. That seemed to be that. Everything back on track. And then you came along.’ He sighed and said sorrowfully, ‘What on earth were you thinking of?’

  Driving the car away with Eileen beside me was an event in the distant past. An archaeologist digging into prehistory might be able to tell something had been built on a particular spot, but not why. After a time, there was nothing but guesses.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Anyway, Mr Shea wasn’t in the best of tempers when he came back empty-handed from chasing you. Unfortunately, his solution was that we should pay him what he’d lost. He couldn’t see it was a problem we all shared.’

  ‘Shea’s dead,’ I said. ‘The receptionist, Theresa, told me.’

  ‘Didn’t you see it in the papers?’

  ‘I haven’t seen a paper in a while.’

  ‘They made quite a splash of it. It was on the wireless, too – not just the Scottish news, the one from London as well.’ As the car took a corner at speed, the fat leg nudged mine. ‘He was found at three in the morning lying in the middle of the road outside the Stevenson Memorial Church in Belmont Street. It took some time to identify him, for there wasn’t much of his face left. Although his head had been beaten to a pulp, there was no blood, which meant he’d been brought there after he was killed. The police decided he’d probably been dumped from a car. They wanted to know if anyone had seen a car stopping at the church after midnight. If he was killed indoors, they said, the room must have been covered in blood. Halfway up the walls, they said. We’d to keep our eyes open. Lots of appeals like that. But he was such a bad man, I doubt if they’re looking too hard. The Deputy Chief Constable himself told me – this was after his third malt – Shea was responsible for four killings they couldn’t prove. People were too afraid of him to testify, he explained. Do you know what he told me then?’

  He waited until I admitted I didn’t know.

  ‘Whoever killed that bastard should be given the freedom of the city.’ He could hardly get the words out for giggling.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  For almost two hours I’d been in the front seat beside Bernard with my nose pressed against the window. I couldn’t read a map but, starting from Inverness, it turned out that I had a good memory for the sequence of roads Eileen and I had taken and, at certain moments of doubt, an excellent one for images of the landscape, which culminated at last in a perspective of mountains ahead, making me ask Bernard to turn into a minor road on the right.

  The difficulty came with the network of back roads we then found ourselves in. Over and over again, I was faced with the choice of turning left or right as narrow roads came to junctions or split off, more than once ending in a farm track. Through all this the two brothers were surprisingly quiet, but the temperature climbed until sweat ran down my back. The only thing I could think was that I’d reacted to the first glimpse of the mountains and turned off the main road too soon. It didn’t help that as the minutes passed Bernard’s speed rose so that whenever he stamped on the brakes to surge round a corner the wood of hedges rattled against the window beside me.

  We were past before it registered.

  ‘That’s it! The sign I told you about!’

  I twisted round to look back and he hit the brake so hard my side was battered against the dashboard. He put down his window and, leaning out, reversed in the dark. We’d passed the post going the wrong way. Now, reversed beyond the opening, the headlamps still shone on the back of the sign; but when, rubbing my bruised kidney, I got out to check I could just make out the crude daub done, August had told me, by his sister: SNACKS. We were there. For better or worse.

  There was no attempt to conceal our arrival. As Bernard swung into the yard, our lights flooded across the front of the house. He pulled in behind Eileen’s car, still in the same place outside the shed in which the pig had been killed. Before the engine was switched off, Norman had heaved himself out. As I came beside him, he was fiddling at the boot with the key I’d given him.

  ‘You didn’t lock it,’ he said and lifted the lid.

  I was sure I had, but there was no point in arguing. There wasn’t anything to say. The case wasn’t there.

  Bernard was already walking towards the house. Before he got to the door, it opened and Eileen stood in the entrance. They exchanged words, but though I’d started towards them their voices were too low for me to hear what was said. She turned and he followed her inside.

&nbs
p; Coming into the room, over Bernard’s shoulder I saw Eileen sitting down again at the table, where a place was set for her. August was already seated opposite her, a plateful of food half eaten in front of him. Beate was leaning back against the sink, as if she’d turned from her work at the interruption. For an instant, it held composed and still as a painting and then Norman burst in behind me.

  ‘I’ll put the police on you. Where’s the phone?’ he cried.

  ‘We don’t have one,’ August said. His voice was that of a man from the islands, lilting and apologetic. Sitting at the table, shoulders bowed, slumped over his food, he seemed much smaller than before.

  ‘Has there been an accident?’ Beate asked.

  Ignoring them, Norman pushed past us to the table.

  ‘The case isn’t in the car,’ he wheezed down at Eileen.

  ‘What case?’ she said. Without giving him time to answer, she asked Bernard, ‘A case?’ She made it sound like a bag of dogshit. ‘Is that why you’re here?’

  The two brothers spoke at the same time. Bernard’s monosyllable was lost in Norman’s outburst of anger. ‘Are you telling me you don’t know where it is?’

  ‘Who are these people?’ Beate asked.

  Oddly enough, her question was directed at August. Perhaps she was in the habit of expecting him to know everything. He shrugged and stared down at the table, seeming to try to distance himself from all of us.

  ‘I’m the husband,’ Bernard said. ‘I’ve come to take my wife home.’

  Then an extraordinary thing happened. Eileen looked at me and then at him, and she shook her head. I couldn’t know that the moment had changed my life, but something beyond the mind understood for my heart moved in me.

  She had made a choice between us. He, too, saw that and understood what it meant. For that moment, it was as if the three of us were alone.

  ‘Mr Gas?’ he wondered. The words were dry with contempt, like a stick that was ready to break, but there was no disbelief in them. ‘A boy who ran away because he was frightened.’

  ‘But he came back.’ She spoke quietly, but with an extraordinary soft vehemence.

  Was that enough to make her love me? It was a choice I had hardly considered, and now it had been made for me.

  Norman, however, was not to be turned from his own concern. ‘Where’s it gone?’

  ‘She doesn’t know,’ I said.

  He overshadowed her with his bulk. ‘Either you know or he does. Which is it? Is it the boy? Is he the liar?’ He turned on me. ‘Are you the liar?’

  ‘And if he is,’ Beate cried, ‘hasn’t a son the right to protect his mother?’

  At that, I heard a peculiar click in Bernard’s throat as if the dry stick were being snapped in two.

  ‘A son.’ He hitched himself with one haunch on the table, looking down on Eileen. ‘Well, we always wanted one of those.’

  He looked from her to me, and the heaves of his laughter broke like a tidal wave. It promised us a lifetime of scorn, of hurtful misunderstandings, side-glances, sneers, jokes and asides, all the pain of the mismatched, unmatchable years. We stood under it and weren’t parted. And when it ended, we had survived it and he saw that we had survived it.

  The room put together the broken pieces of its silence. I became conscious of Beate frowning and smiling strangely in her confusion; and that August, even if he didn’t understand everything, had caught the central fact of the relation between Eileen and me.

  Only Norman was unaffected. He had waited the laughter out, let it flow round him, and now went straight on.

  ‘That case belongs to me – to us, my brother and me. We want it back.’

  ‘I don’t know where it is,’ I said.

  As I spoke, my eyes turned to August. As soon as I’d done it, I knew that it must seem like an accusation. Certainly, I didn’t do it deliberately. If there had been a moment of thought, I wouldn’t have risked it. In anticipation perhaps, he had raised his head and met my look blankly, almost vacantly.

  ‘If you think I’ll leave without that case, you’ll make me do damage,’ Norman said. ‘I’ll not be cheated.’

  August sighed. It was a quiet sound after so much noise, but it made its mark.

  ‘I meant no harm,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t understand why it was left locked up out there. Why wasn’t it brought into the house? So I took it out and found a hiding place for it. I’ve never done anything like that in my life before. But that’s all I did. I didn’t even look inside it.’ His voice was dull, like that of a man full of guilt and self-blame. When he went on, it was almost in a whine. ‘There’s no living to be made in a place like this.’ He put his head in his hands and began to weep.

  I looked at him with something like horror.

  ‘Let’s go get it,’ Norman said. To Bernard, he said, ‘You stay here and sort out this pair.’

  ‘Not on your own,’ Bernard said. ‘The two of us’ll go.’

  ‘You not trust me?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Bernard sounded bewildered.

  Norman stared at him, eyes blinking constantly. He must have understood that the idea of being deserted for the money had never entered his brother’s head.

  ‘All I meant was I can do it myself. You know I can. See what I brought?’ With a struggle – maybe it was held by the fat of his belly – he pulled a gun from under his jacket. Waving it at us, he said, ‘Don’t worry about it working. I got it from a friend of ours.’ He giggled. ‘He doesn’t need it any more.’

  At sight of the gun, August put his forehead down on the table and covered his head with his arms. It was ignominious.

  Norman waddled behind him and poked him in the neck with the gun.

  ‘Monkeys do that,’ he said, grinning at his brother over the crouching man. ‘It means: my arse is yours.’ He poked again, the gun gouging into flesh. ‘Stand up!’

  August lurched to his feet, but bowed forward, leaning on the table as if his legs could hardly support him.

  ‘Where is it?’ the fat man shouted, his voice breaking with excitement. His eyes went round the room. ‘Where have you hidden it?’

  ‘Outside,’ August mumbled.

  ‘What? What?’

  ‘I dug a hole under a rock.’

  ‘Show me, you bastard!’

  August began to move towards the door. Panting for breath, Norman crowded after him. The gun jabbed and jabbed. August showed no sign of feeling it.

  ‘Don’t think I wouldn’t kill you,’ Norman said. There was a euphoria about him that reminded me of my friend Tony the morning after he claimed to have lost his virginity.

  Bernard said suddenly, ‘Something’s wrong.’

  He moved in front of them, blocking August. Till that moment his features had been blurred, now they were sharp, wary and suspicious. It was as if he had come awake.

  Catching August by the chin, forcing his head up, he asked, ‘Why hide it outside?’

  But it was Norman who answered. Voice shrill and breaking, he cried, ‘Because he was frightened.’

  ‘Tell us again,’ Bernard insisted. ‘Where’s the money?’

  ‘Under a rock by a pool,’ August said.

  Bernard slapped him in the face. The act was horrifying but the reaction was worse, for August whimpered.

  ‘Tell us where! We’ll find it ourselves.’

  ‘And leave him here?’ Norman sneered. ‘Where’s the sense in that?’ It seemed his brother becoming active was an unwelcome development.

  Bernard ignored him. ‘We could shoot you in the legs,’ he told August. ‘That would keep you here till we came back.’

  ‘Please,’ August begged. ‘You wouldn’t find it in the dark.’

  ‘We’ve got all night.’

  Norman lost patience at this. He shoved August so that he staggered forward, causing Bernard instinctively to step aside. As he did, August moved out into the hall and opened the outside door. Next moment, as if he had tugged the brothers in his wake, all three were
gone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  I didn’t so much sit down as collapse into a chair opposite Eileen, my legs giving way under me. Next moment, I was lifted to my feet by the sound of a car coughing into life. When I went outside, there were no clouds and the sky was full of stars.

  A figure coming to my side startled me. The height, almost the same as mine, told me it was Beate.

  ‘They’ve taken their car,’ I said. The low note of the engine grumbled along, not fading at all. ‘Why would they take a car?’

  ‘The fat one was in a hurry. He had no time to waste.’

  Though she stood close enough to make me uncomfortable, she kept her face turned from me as she spoke.

  ‘August said he’d hidden the case under a rock near a pool.’ She didn’t answer. ‘There’s just the one pool near here, isn’t there?’

  I could hear the sigh of her breath, feel its warmth on my cheek. She was so close I caught her smell, not very clean, but mixed with a salty, heavy warmth.

  ‘Why didn’t August take them by the path?’ I persisted.

  ‘Maybe he tried,’ she said softly, ‘and they were frightened.’

  Not Norman, I thought. Not the fat man, transformed and self-intoxicated. But Bernard might have been. Not frightened – that wasn’t his style – but cautious.

  A different question occurred to me. ‘Can you get to the pool from the road?’ The day I walked up to the croft on the hill I hadn’t seen a track off to the left, but there was no reason why I should have noticed one.

  Without answering, she stepped away to fade back in the darkness.

  When I went inside, Eileen was in the same place, hands clasped in front of her on the table. I sat down beside her and, after a moment, put my hand on hers. It was the first time I had touched her in a way that made a claim upon her. She didn’t move her hands from under mine.