Alice was looking at the old wallpaper. ‘The way my mother spoke to you when you were a boy,’ she said. ‘She hardly spoke to me at all when I was a girl, and there were these long absences, when she was away somewhere, Blackpool probably or on holidays with him, and I stayed with the neighbours. My father I only saw a few times and I can’t picture him ever once lifting me up. He was awkward. He once gave me a doll but I felt it had belonged to somebody else.’
‘Mum.’
‘No, it’s all right. It was different with you and my mother. I remember you saying to her “What’s colour, Granny?” and she pinched your cheek.’
‘I remember that.’
‘And she said, “Colour is light on fire.”’
LANGOUSTINES
When Gordon turned up he was pleased to know the menu better than anybody else and he wanted to argue about fisheries and good governance but Luke asked if they could change the subject. Alice blushed and looked at her husband. They knew Luke was wrong. Gordon stroked his moustache with his bottom lip as a way of not speaking up, though to him it was a pity about his stepson, who obviously went away too young and no longer understood the priorities of his country. He knew nothing about policy and taxes or what makes a people, and now, God help him, he was like those kids who think their country is Google.
‘You’re just not going deep enough,’ Luke said. ‘Money has imploded. Religion has gone mad. Privacy is disappearing. The ice-cap is melting and children are starving to death. And you want to sing an old song about national togetherness.’
‘He does a couple of tours in Afghanistan and suddenly he’s Bill Gates,’ Gordon said.
‘I did four tours in Iraq.’
‘Of course.’
‘You’re not thinking.’
‘No,’ Gordon said. ‘We’re thinking, in our own country, about how it’s important to ensure that elderly people can still get their medicine.’
‘Luke,’ Alice said. ‘You’ve always had your head in the clouds. Always the idealist.’
‘Out of touch with reality,’ said Gordon.
‘The games are finished. All bets are off,’ Luke said. ‘We’re living in the big world now.’
‘This is a big enough world for me,’ Gordon said.
‘So why make it smaller?’
‘I thought you wanted to change the subject, Luke,’ his mother said and she smiled without comfort.
Gordon was wearing a yellow sweater. He knew how to make money but didn’t really know how to spend it. It showed on his face, Alice thought, wondering if she was just too caught up in the mystery of her own family’s approval. That was it. When his langoustines came and Gordon sniffed them on the plate she realised his lack of style told against him in a way she tried to ignore. She loved him for his kindness and his politics but not really for himself.
‘You’ll come round,’ she said to Luke. ‘The whole country’s slowly coming round and you will, too.’
After a while they talked about the business of Anne’s photography and the letter that came from Canada. Alice said the photographs were just another part of Anne’s secretive life. She had kept it all back for her private self and her times in Blackpool. ‘If the offer had come even ten years ago’, she said, ‘we’d all have jumped on a plane to Toronto and been proud to see her having her moment.’
Luke didn’t believe it. He didn’t believe there was ever a time like that, when Alice would happily have flown to Toronto to celebrate her mother’s achievement. ‘I don’t think it’s for us to say what happens,’ he said. ‘I don’t know anything about photography but it’s important for her.’
‘She’s just not fit enough,’ Alice said.
‘We’ll see.’
‘You don’t seem to understand something, Luke. I know my mother. I know everything about her.’
But he could see it happening. He was certain the exhibition would take place and that his grandmother would be part of it. He had no idea what it would take, but he knew he would go there, that his mother would come too, and they would see for the first time what Anne had done. He pondered the possibility that his grandmother had once had a fresh vision of life and he wanted to place himself within it. Alice, too: he wanted to put her there, even as she said no. He wasn’t angry at his mother for trying to bury the whole thing.
‘Maybe some day,’ she said.
‘But let’s try.’
She shook her head. It was too late for exhibitions and speeches and trips to Canada. It was enough that they take care of Anne and manage her illness. Alice said her mother didn’t know the difference any more between the past and the present, and Luke suddenly thought of an American poet he’d loved when he was a student, Wallace Stevens. After the lunch he would go to the bookshop and buy the poems.
‘They’re probably worth a bomb, her pictures,’ Gordon said, checking his phone. Luke said he would stand by whatever decision Alice made about the exhibition. Anne’s work, Anne’s life, would take its own course regardless. And Luke would try to help his mother, just help her to overcome all the pain and the mess of her first life.
He felt the strange, loose spreading of the afternoon that comes after a few beers. He could say something. ‘It’s true. I wasn’t always sure myself what was real and what wasn’t.’
‘When?’
‘Out there. On the last tour of duty.’
‘Why was that?’ Alice asked.
‘Too much gaming,’ he said. ‘Too much Dad.’
‘I buried your father in his Royal Western Fusiliers dress uniform. Red hackle and everything.’
‘It’s over,’ Luke said.
Alice just sat when he left the restaurant. Gordon was off talking to the maître d’ and she could hear him laughing, his present-day-ness, all that, making him free.
BOBBY’S BAR
Maureen thought it was funny to see him after all the letters and everything. Just normal, wearing jeans. ‘Don’t ask me how I get to know these things,’ she said to Alice on the phone, ‘but apparently he was in and out the pubs down the town, the wee Saltcoats pubs, you know, that one by the railway station. This was after he saw you in Glasgow. These pubs: dog rough, if you ask me, but there you go. The men like these pubs on a Friday night. The girl who used to work in the wedding shop in Kilwinning was behind the bar. She says he had an alteration with some of them.’
‘An altercation,’ Alice said.
‘That’s right.’
‘Dear God,’ Alice said. ‘I got a text back from him. He said he was fine and heading home.’
‘You don’t grudge a young man a drink, not after what he’s been through. You would sooner he didn’t get into arguments but there’s no controlling men once they’re together, sure there’s not? Anyway, he came in here in the afternoon after he’d seen you and before he went to the pub. It was funny to see him wearing jeans after the lovely uniform and everything. I’d only seen your Luke in photographs, you see.’
‘He’s looking thin,’ Alice said.
‘He’s a handsome fellow,’ Maureen replied. ‘Anyway, he knows what he’s about. I said if his gran wasn’t in her flat she’d be down there drying her towels. He went off to see Anne and it was about an hour before I saw her in the corridor, dawdling back with her laundry basket. Quite happy. In a wee world of her own.’
Luke ended up in Bobby’s Bar and at one point was standing beside a girl with platinum hair. She had lilac eyes and false eyelashes and was part of a hen night. She said the colour wasn’t real, it was special contact lenses. He was talking to her and lifting shots off the bar and throwing them back, red shots, one after the other. His vision was blurred. He crooked an arm around the girl and she didn’t care one way or the other. ‘She’s spoken for, by the way,’ her friend said.
‘That’s cool,’ he said. ‘I’m off duty. Everybody’s off duty for ever and that’s it.’
The friend just shook her head. She couldn’t decide if she liked his face or not. He was nice and tall but h
e seemed like trouble. ‘You’re a bit of a thinker,’ she said. She thought he must’ve been a student before or something like that, the way he had a bottle of Evian in the pocket of his bomber jacket.
‘A thinker,’ she repeated.
‘Oh aye. That’s me. Rudyard Kipling.’
Most of the men at the bar were older than him and they couldn’t be bothered with hen parties. They might put a coin in the pot but they were busy talking to each other and looking up at the television to see the scores. Luke passed out the Red Cola shots to the girls two at a time. ‘Who’s the one daft enough to be getting married?’
‘A real man, at last,’ the lippy one said. Some of the men at the bar looked round and shook their heads. Luke had been shy as a student but he could remember one day walking to the Andersonian Library with the army leaflets and thinking he might be an officer and women would like it. He had been doing an essay on Thomas Hardy and one night he dreamt he was walking in uniform towards a pile of rags. He couldn’t remember the girl in the book he was reading, or the soldier, but he remembered the feeling of power he had, the sense that a woman had taken off her clothes for him and was nearby.
The girls took pictures.
Shrieked.
Downed shots.
Kelly with the lilac eyes grabbed a handful of money from the pot held by the bride-to-be. ‘Our turn,’ she said, smiling a lipstick smile and squeezing into the bar. Luke wondered what her friend’s wedding would be like and imagined men outside the function suite smoking on the steps. The noise of the fruit machine seemed to infect his sense of things, a robust, well-lighted anxiety in the corner. Maybe he had never been enough of a lad to really connect with the whole platoon. He remembered their fear that something big might never happen.
‘What’s your name?’ the girl said.
‘Captain Campbell.’
‘You’re in the army?’
‘I was, aye.’
‘We could tell.’
‘How come?’
‘There’s lots of squaddies in this town. And you can just tell them by the way they stand.’
‘Right.’
‘Not many drink in here, though.’
He looked at the bottles and the masses of postcards and Celtic memorabilia. ‘My name’s Luke.’
‘Check how you stand up straight. And check out your haircut and all that, the tanned face.’
‘Maybe I went to the Sun Splash.’
‘You kiddin’?’ her friend said, eyes bright. ‘There’s nothing you can tell her about fake tan. And that is not a fake tan you are wearing. Take it from the experts.’
Kelly smiled and handed him a shot of something very sweet and green. ‘Apple Sourz,’ she said and the barmaid put the bottle down on the counter. The barmaid seemed to know the girls at the hen party and the bride especially.
‘Oh, that’s pure disgusting,’ one of them said.
Luke ordered a lager top. The girls left in a flurry of plans and proper nouns, places to go next, battle cries and whispered invitations. The lilac-eyed Kelly stood looking for a second. ‘You’re a honey,’ she said, reaching up to kiss him on the lips. Then her fingernails cascaded goodbye in the air.
‘I think you’re in,’ the guy next to him said, nodding in a pair of paint-spattered overalls. The girl behind the bar was looking over at Luke like she knew him. He drank his pint and tried to ignore the buzz of the fruit machine and the telly. Maybe my grandmother never really knew the people in her life, he thought. Maybe none of us do. We didn’t put in the hours. A man in a Celtic top was holding up the European Cup in several of the photographs pinned up behind the bar.
‘A whisky please; a Talisker.’
There was a barman behind there, too. He reached up and served Luke a decent one. Hand-poured. And Luke felt his mouth was instantly on fire, the whisky burning off the sugar and the nonsense of the previous drinks. His tongue shrank. His family was known for bravery but maybe it had never actually produced a brave man in all these years. He was drunk. The alcohol was now clearing a path to the loneliest part of him and when an Irish song began he stepped outside to smoke.
He had a text from Flannigan in Liverpool, out on the lash with his brother and his schoolmates.
Squad of horror-pigs down here lad total cocknoshes man I h8 them.
Dooley was struggling down in Cork, already champing at the bit to get back for another tour:
Hey Jimmy-Jimmy. Not seen the ladz or heard much fm the bitches but bored man still thinking about Ops. Weird shit sir and douche bags in the papers don’t know nothing. Totally misinformative. Im in car park waiting for Rosie to get off fuckn work have you seen the ladz?
He smoked and used the thumb of his other hand to text back his mother.
Thanks. I’m down seeing Gran but going back up to Glasgow tonight.
He wondered if other people had to think before leaving kisses. The Kilmarnock bus via Pennyburn passed and he took in the emptiness on the upper deck. Nothing is emptier than an empty bus. Seagulls drifted over the railway station and music came pounding from one of the lounge bars at the end of Countess Street. Lennox sent him a smiley face, the third that day, a solitary smiley face. To Luke it said all the things the ginger nut was trying to say. He could see Lennox talking like a hero in some Belfast pub with the boys around him lapping it up. Then Lennox would go to the jacks and piss his wages into the metal trough remembering faraway mortars and shouts down there in the valley. Leaning on the tiles and texting smiley faces to the captain.
He wrote back:
Hey Andy. Keep smiling mate.
There’s no such thing as a quiet drink. Not for Luke, anyway, and not in Bobby’s Bar on a Friday. Luke went in and out of the general cheer and at one point was chuckling to himself on a bar-stool as the noise level rose. A man in an anorak came up when Luke was past caring about military decorum or the last train. ‘I’m not being cheeky, pal,’ the guy said, ‘but can I ask you, were you in the Royal Caledonians?’ Luke turned. He swayed and the man with his hands in his pockets was still speaking. It was a question. ‘Is that your regiment?’
‘Who’s asking?’ The man was on a reluctant mission but he had something invested in carrying it off. Honour, Luke supposed, and honour was the thing that ruined a man’s happiness. He wiped his mouth and gripped the bar. Next minute he was over in the corner talking to a very fat man. Even in drink, Luke could see the man was wider than the copper table covered in empty tumblers and packs of Regal King Size.
‘I think you knew my son.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Mark McNulty.’
Luke knew right away. He had known the boy was local. He’d known there was a chance when he came into the town. And even through the fog of drink he knew it was the boy’s father, the soldier called Mark who was killed at Bad Kichan. He suddenly saw the boy in the terrible heat of Helmand, smiling kid, eager as anything, one of the detachment squirting him with sunscreen by the ruined fort. Looking into his father’s face and putting his hand into his, Luke saw again the boy’s fury as he shouted in the road and he saw Rashid lifting his gun and shooting him at close quarters. He saw again the boy being hit and the copper bowls erupting and the blood that came from the boy’s mouth.
‘I recognised you from the papers,’ Mr McNulty was saying. Luke was still standing next to the tables. He wanted the boy’s father to come outside to speak in private, just for a moment, because he hadn’t expected to meet him like this and he was trying to become the captain again despite being drunk. The gesture the man made with his hands made it clear he was stuck and didn’t want to move outside.
‘We won’t be long,’ he said.
‘I wasn’t with the Caledonians,’ Luke said, sitting down. ‘I was a captain with the Royal Western Fusiliers.’
Mr McNulty stared.
‘We have a long tradition of combat. Fighting in war zones all over the world.’
‘What is this, a careers talk?’
; Luke wasn’t sure what to say. He wanted to open up with something official and grand, providing a dignified context to the condolences he intended to offer. It was hard to do this after all the drink. ‘It’s a long tradition, Mr McNulty and … many men have given their lives.’
‘Oh, aye. Very good. And do you have a long tradition of taking twenty-one-year-old boys off the beaten track and having them murdered by people on your own side?’ The man was red with anger, his hand shaking over his glass and then quickly wiping his mouth.
‘Mr McNulty, we were ambushed. There was nothing we could do. He was a brave soldier.’
‘Oh fuck off.’
‘We …’
‘Just fuck off. Brave soldier. He was a silly wee boy who thought he could see the world. Fucking running into bullets since he was about eight years old. And then he really ran into one, didn’t he? They say he wanted a square-go with the Taliban and next thing he’s back here in a box. Broke his mother’s heart. He’s over in the graveyard, Captain. My wee boy’s over in the graveyard and you can tell me whenever you’re ready what it was for, because they sent some medals, but maybe you can explain them to me, each one, the silver one, what was that for?’
‘I’m sorry, Mr McNulty. This isn’t the place.’
‘It’s as good as any place.’ He looked up at the two behind the bar and shouted out, ‘Hey, Brian. I didnae realise you were inviting the British army into the bar these days!’
Luke was staring at the man and he tried not to think about his own father and how he had died for Ireland. ‘I’m not going to argue with you, Mr McNulty. I’m just very sorry. Your son was a brave man and it shouldn’t have happened.’
‘Oh, he was a fucking pest. Joining the army. I don’t know where you’re from but we’re not army people. And he goes and gets himself fucking killed into the bargain.’
‘He did his best.’
‘No, he didn’t. He died, son. He died for nothing. And people like you can say what you like. You sent my boy back in a box and now you’re drinking in my pub.’
Luke stood up.
The Illuminations Page 16