Dessert is served with coffee, except it’s not coffee, it’s espresso and like their daft tea it’s served in egg cups. I decide to get Kirkland a huge fuck-off mug for Christmas to dwarf all these tiny wee dishes his mum’s got. Fiona gives me a huge slice of cake, but remains unable to mask her discomfort, basically she wants me to fuck off and never come back and is totally shiting it in case I drag her son off to Sighthill and start injecting him with heroin.
Out of nowhere Gus announces he’s from Sighthill. He doesn’t elaborate or anything but he’s obviously embarrassed. I don’t ask too many questions though I’m dying to know how someone from Sighthill ends up in a town house in Kelvinside, while Gus is wondering how a girl from Sighthill ended up in his designer kitchen.
“Meeting Fiona saved my life.” He puts his hand on her hand, she cooperates but she really wants him to shut the fuck up about their business so she changes the subject pronto.
“So, Marnie, what does your father do?”
“He’s a stockbroker at LGL, Fiona.”
“Really,” she says.
“Naw. He’s an alkie, left when I was wee.”
The room freezes. I want to laugh so hard, I mean it’s mostly true, except he’s not going anywhere, not in the state he’s in.
“Sorry to hear that, Marnie,” says Gus.
“Marn,” I correct even though it’s not what I’m called and it doesn’t have any ring to it.
“Right, Marn.” He doesn’t think it has a ring to it either.
Then Gus says, “I know what you’re going through, what it’s like to live with people like that.”
He’s totally softened, Fiona just about disappears up her own arse when he confides this.
“My da was a drinker, but then he stopped. Came back into my life and tried to make amends for the things he’d done, you know, but it was too late. He died last year,” he says.
“And your mum?” I ask.
“Cancer,” he says. “Been gone ten years now.”
I want to say I’m sorry but I don’t get a chance. Fiona says, “More coffee?” to indicate the end of lunch and my imminent departure.
“I’m fine. Not really into espresso,” I say.
“Let’s go, Marn!” says Kirkland, emphatic on the Marn.
“Nice meeting you,” I say to Gus and Fiona, but to be honest it was only nice meeting Gus, now that I’ve got to know him and all that.
Before I leave we go to Kirkland’s room to get my coat, but really to sell Kirkland two jellies courtesy of Mick. Kirkland loves jellies. Now I know why.
Lennie
His name’s Robert Macdonald and he abandoned his wife and his daughter. He tells me that he was an alcoholic and of his shame for beating Isabel and her mother. I don’t know what to make of it all. He tells us Isabel was ten years old when he left her. He talks of his regrets and his need to say sorry to a woman who has in fact abandoned her own children. He says he’s been looking for Isabel for a long time. Robert T. Macdonald is a craftsman now and looking to make amends. He makes rocking chairs and sells them on the Internet, to Americans mostly. He wants to impress Nelly by how changed he is, but Nelly seems afraid of such assertions and not sure what they mean from someone who is nothing more than a stranger.
He possesses an incautious honesty and I can’t deny I’m intrigued by the eyes belonging to the younger of his grandchildren. I tell him Isabel and Gene are in Turkey. We just want him to go away. I tell him I’m closely acquainted with his daughter and assure him she won’t be back until September, I say she’s an artist and paints landscapes. He likes this story, as does Nelly. It makes him relieved in a way, lessens his remorse slightly for a life he imagines went on in spite of him and not because of him. If only that were true. At that moment I want to tell him the truth, he deserves it. Your whore daughter could be anywhere. Obviously I don’t say that. He’s a very big man. Hands like shovels.
When he leaves he thanks me for the tea and the lemon loaf I baked the night before. Personally I thought it was a little dry, but he had two slices, which was very good of him. Anyway he hands me a picture of his child and immediately I am struck by how like Marnie she is. Robert asks me to give Isabel the picture, it has a number inked on the back, an old snap, faded in places, and a much younger man I suppose to be him holding tight a child I know to be Isabel. The picture leaves Nelly shaken. She grabs it and won’t let it go. He sees this and our eyes lock. This is when Marnie arrives, just flings open the door and there she is, soaked to the bone.
“Isabel,” he says.
Nelly
A graying fellow who said he was our grandfather, the father of our mother.
Lennie was a gentleman as always, able to ignore his admissions of violence but I was frightened by them.
We must lie to the chap, this much I am sure of. Telling the truth doesn’t matter to a stranger for he knows little and can judge nothing.
Mother has gone and there is nothing to be done and the man who eats practically all of Lennie’s cake must leave and before Marnie returns for she will positively faint at the sight of him.
Marnie
He says he was in Barcelona, Seville, Morocco, and Egypt. He seeks out carpentry designs from other lands. Furniture. Talks about chairs for a while. I want to douse myself in petrol and light a fag. He’s boring. Very boring. Drones an entire life at me. I look at the photograph of Izzy as a child holding tight her father’s hand and I want to throw something at him. I imagine the pain she’d feel looking at the picture, I imagine her recalling a life beyond the photograph, and I imagine her heartbreak. She told us how he beat her, how he beat her mother and though he’s sorry for his sins it’s too late to atone for them, except he doesn’t know that and I do, so does Nelly. It’s pathetic and sad, but not for him. For his daughter, dead and not quite buried. I want to drink and smoke and feel like I can’t. I just want him to leave and there’s Lennie passing out cups and saucers, lighters and ashtrays. I decide fuck it and pull out a cigarette, see what Grandpa will do and he flinches a little, I offer him one but he refuses, says he stopped when he found Jesus.
I smoke my cigarettes, staring into his eyes, it feels like we’re cowboys on a dusty trail sizing each other up before we shoot each other. My gun is loaded. I don’t have to check, the bullet is a dead daughter. I don’t know what his bullet is.
“She told us you were dead.”
“Well I’m not,” he says.
“Obviously,” I say back.
“This cake is divine Lennie, truly it is,” says Nelly, lightening the atmosphere except she doesn’t. “You’re quite the chef, old man. Isn’t he a find, Mr. Macdonald?”
He doesn’t say anything for a minute, like everyone else who meets Nelly for the first time, he’s stunned and silent. Absorbing, not comprehending. He nods.
“It’s fantastic,” he tells Lennie.
Nelly smiles at me, a knowing look in her eye. We will never tell this stranger where Izzy is. We are keeping our secret and we are keeping it from everyone.
Lennie
When the girls woke up and found him on the sofa they weren’t best pleased and when I say “they” I mean Marnie, but it’s my house and I can invite who I like. Anyway he was sickly and almost passed out on the floor at the sight of her. She is so like Isabel as a child it frightened him half to death and rather surprised me for they look nothing like one another, not now. We spent the evening talking is all. I needed to get the measure of him. Protect them. He’s not all there. I can see it in his eyes.
First thing I do is the politics conversation. He’s a staunch Conservative and very religious. Then he starts a conversation about his travels, obviously he thought it would fascinate me, but I’ve done some traveling in my own life and wasn’t too impressed. I found him broken in places, hidden places. I found him dull.
He makes quite a bit of money doing what he does and was very candid about his earnings. He plans to offer much of it to his lost daughter and probabl
y thinks it will make a difference, perhaps change her, but it won’t and anyway it’s not that kind of money. He’ll definitely be comfortable, be able to keep a house and live out his years. He has a stall at the Barrowland, a busy workshop, and an apprentice he’s proud of, a young lad he found on the streets, he says. He pays him a small wage for minding the stall and is teaching him the trade. The lad lives in Robert’s workshop. Robert says he’s a born carpenter. It’s a marvelous thing to have done for a child and this I was impressed by, but the rest of him? I suppose he’s amiable enough, but there’s an edge to the man, I can feel it, something sour and it’s vexing. He says he has a Web site and calls himself the Tartan Craftsman. The Americans flock to him, but he’ll need more than a catchy title to get the attentions of his grandchildren, that much I do know.
He’s obviously interested in the girls, though he certainly wasn’t prepared for Nelly, and you could see Marnie’s smoking rattled his cage. Of course he wants to know all about Isabel, but I don’t have a great deal to tell him about his daughter and what I do know he won’t want to hear. He is full of remorse and shame and told me stories of her mother, his ex-wife, which filled me with pity for the girl, but then an image of Izzy in a shopping trolley, legs akimbo, swilling back the Buckfast emerged and my sympathy was somewhat diluted.
He asked if I thought she might be looking for him. I shook my head. I felt sorry for him then. He sort of shrugged it off as a joke, but I know he meant it.
Breakfast was a big affair. It always is in my house: sausages, bacon, fried bread and egg (I’m trying desperately to fatten up Marnie at the moment, skin and bones that one). I think she’s anorexic. I asked her if she was feeling okay the other day and of course she says she’s fine, then she grabs a piece of toast and she’s out the door faster than a fly.
They stay here mostly. They sneak in through the back, so the neighbors don’t see, not that the neighbors see a great deal, blind to most things in fact, including the absence of two abhorrent parents and the abandonment of two lost children. I feel quite sick about it. Who wouldn’t?
Marnie
Lennie let Izzy’s dad stay over. I nearly died when I saw him on the sofa. Asked me what was I up to today? I said, “Nothing,” and ran out the door before he started asking more questions.
What’s he doing here? What does he want? He’s got some neck on him that’s for sure, thinking he can just show up like this. And what exactly does he expect? That Izzy’s going to turn up and fall into his arms? She probably would, knowing her, if she actually had any arms. She was like that, a total people pleaser, she couldn’t say no to anyone, including Gene.
He keeps asking us if we need anything but I’d rather eat shite than take his money. It seems to me if he’d been a better father we might have had a better mother.
Now he’s going to hang about and wait for her and when she doesn’t turn up he’ll ask more questions. It’s a mess. The one thing making it easier to hide Gene and Izzy in the flower beds is the fact no one except Mick is interested in their whereabouts. It turns out Gene was selling for him and when he “left,” Gene owed Mick a lot of money. Mick says it’s worth thousands, but it’s thousands he owes to Vlado and like his associates Vlado doesn’t give a flying fuck why Mick can’t pay so Mick had to sell half the stuff in his house including a very nice flat-screen television, but it still wasn’t enough. Vlado actually came to the van the other night. I was doing some revision in the back. He just takes the book off me and flicks through the pages and then he asks me if I know the difference between the perimeter of a circle and the circumference of a circle.
I said, “The circumference of a circle is the length of the curve that surrounds it.”
“And how is this exemplified?”
“By its center and its radius.”
“What is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter?”
I say, “Pi.”
“Very good,” he says and returns the book to me. Then he looks me up and down like he did in the stairwell and says, “It is better to study. No?”
“I suppose.”
He makes no reply, as if he’d spoken to himself, as if I hadn’t spoken at all.
When Mick got back from the tower, Vlado pulls him to the side. Vlado’s taller than Mick, younger, stronger. His face is hard, his eyes soft. His hair is dark and fine and falls a little over his face. He wears a short army coat. Leather boots. Smells clean, as if he just had a shower.
Anyway I could tell they were talking about me, all the time looking back at me and nodding, a few pulled faces, Vlado’s finger prodding at Mick’s shoulder, pushing him a little, don’t know what they were saying, but Mick looked scared. When he gets back to the van I asked him what Vlado’s problem was and Mick says, “He doesn’t want you working with me anymore.”
“What’s it got to do with him?” I ask.
“Everything,” he says.
“So that’s it? No more rounds.”
“No more rounds,” he says.
“So he’s making you fire me?”
“I’m sorry.”
“But I need the money!”
“I don’t give a shit what you need. Your da’s got ma money and see when I find him I’m going to rip his fucking throat out.”
“What about us?”
“You’re fifteen. I’m married. S’over.”
I don’t even know what to say to that. He parks the van for a minute.
“If Gene shows up call me, if he shows up and you don’t call me, you’ll know about it, hen. Understand?”
“You owe me money,” I say.
“And when your da gives me mine, I’ll give you yours.” Then he drives off. I’m not even near my house, only three quid on me and it’s late. I want to kill that Vlado. It’s none of his business how I earn, but Mick’s terrified of Vlado and terrified of the people he works for. Dangerous people. It serves him right for getting greedy. Gene had connections at the colleges and universities and Mick said they were making good money, until Gene went missing that is.
Don’t know where he put it, the stash I mean. I know it’s not in the house, but it might be and so every day before school I check a new corner, but nothing.
It’s been a shit week all round to be honest. Nelly forgot her own birthday and got upset when we remembered. Lennie baked her a cake and Nelly threw it at the wall. Seriously. Then she started crying and then screaming. It was a total scene. Lennie was horrified. He’d gotten her a nice box of perfume and I got her earrings but then I decided to keep them on account of her being a nightmare bitch. I was glad when she went to her room. So was Lennie. She’s such a weirdo freak sometimes. I hate saying it but it’s true. Why can’t she be normal?
Later on I went to Kirkland’s house and we shagged, I don’t know why. After we’re done, he wants to smooch but I just want to get away from him. I feel sick we had sex to be honest. He tries to give me money for a taxi home and that makes me feel like a prostitute so I says, “Fuck off. I’ll walk.” He goes all mortified then and offers to come with me, I tell him it’s only nine o’clock and rapists don’t start work till after the pubs close. He thinks that’s funny ’cause he’s an idiot. Then he lets me go and tries to give me a kiss, but I don’t let him. I don’t even like him.
Nelly
How I raged at Lennie for his teenage cake, at Marnie for her teenage gift. What need have I for earrings? I have no piercings. It’s not a special day, it has never been a special day, and I am not different on account of it. Why couldn’t they forget as I had? Cakes and gifts. Candles and icing. Thirteen years of age it said. Happy Birthday it said. How dare they. Intolerable. Infuriating. I won’t hear of it. It is not my birthday. It has never been my birthday or perhaps Marnie has forgotten the waiting for Mother and Father to recall such days. The wide-open mouths when they are reminded, the shame of having to remind them at all. Maybe Marnie has forgotten her own thirteenth year when Father called her a woman and followed her f
rom room to room with daisies and gin. I have not forgotten for it is flawed to offer a teenager alcohol. It is forbidden. One can get into a great deal of trouble with the law for enticing a minor. Fortunately she didn’t drink any, but he did and a great deal if memory serves. Mother had fallen asleep and didn’t seem to care at all that evening, not even for Marnie, who was forced to like daisies, a flower she doesn’t care for at all.
Lennie
Nelly was furious, which is a shame because I’d made her a beautiful birthday cake, a raspberry sponge filled with butter cream and a stunning liqueur sauce. I could have screamed when she threw it at the wall. She could have at least tasted it first. What a child she is and crying all over the place while I’m wondering how to get the bloody cake off the wallpaper. She needed her arse whipped for that. I can just imagine my mother’s face if I’d thrown as much as a teaspoon in our house. Very strict my mother was and as for my father he spent most of my life on a chair by the window reading his newspapers and cleaning his glasses. I don’t think he looked up at me for thirty-five years and even when he did, it was only because he’d fallen on his arse and needed help to a chair.
“Good job, Lennie,” he said.
When my mother died he was suddenly all alone in the house, but would he leave it? No he wouldn’t.
“It’s my home and I intend to stay in it, I will not languish in a hospital bed. I’d rather die behind the door,” he yelled and that’s exactly what happened. He’d called my sister Eve and said he was feeling poorly and could she come round, but Eve wouldn’t go and so the cheeky bitch called me. He’d had a stroke and his little body was so cold I couldn’t exactly say how long he’d lain there, but not long, old people are always cold aren’t they? Still, I felt bad and for a long time afterward. Even now I wonder if I could have gotten there quicker but I was in the middle of dinner wasn’t I? I didn’t know he was going to die.
The Death of Bees: A Novel Page 8