Bob Skiinner 21 Grievous Angel

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘You’re not taking the bus,’ I declared. I didn’t want her to go at all.

  ‘I am,’ she insisted. ‘I didn’t come out here meaning to let you run me back home. I’m a big girl; I know how to get on and off a bus.’

  ‘Train would be better,’ my pragmatic daughter pointed out. ‘There’s one from Drem at ten past six.’

  ‘That’ll do then.’

  I was tempted to ask her to stay and eat with us. We always went out on Saturdays, usually somewhere within walking distance, so that I could have a glass of wine, or two, or three. That evening we were booked into the Roseberry and I knew that they’d have fitted in a third, but I didn’t want to push it with her. I drove her to the station, with Alex in the back seat.

  ‘It’s been a lovely afternoon,’ Mia said, as we saw the approaching train in the distance.

  ‘Would you like to do it again?’ I asked. ‘Maybe just the two of us,’ I suggested, ‘to give you a break from the interrogation?’

  ‘What about your girlfriend?’

  I thought about the doorway of the Sheraton. ‘I’m not sure she is any more. In any event, the accent’s always been on the friend part of it.’

  ‘So you tell yourself, I’m sure,’ she murmured. ‘Tell you what, call me at the studio on Monday, when we’ve both had time to think about it. Unless you’re too busy, that is.’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ I promised.

  Alex was silent, all the way home, and for a while after that. I switched on the TV and caught up with the news. The weekend offered a break from stories of parliamentary sleaze, but the news bulletins were dominated by a disaster on Mount Everest, where storms had killed up to eleven climbers, while the main sports headline was Manchester United’s victory over Liverpool in the FA Cup final, thanks to a late goal by Eric the Red. I’d forgotten that the game had been on telly, live.

  My preoccupation wasn’t lost on my daughter. ‘You like Mia, Dad, don’t you?’ she ventured, finally.

  ‘Sure,’ I replied. ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Of course I do, she’s brilliant.’ She hesitated. ‘I like Alison too.’

  ‘And so do I.’

  I was watching the third rerun of Cantona’s volley when she pulled over the footstool I never used and placed it between me and the screen. ‘Pops, can we have a grown-up talk?’ she asked.

  ‘I thought we always did.’

  ‘Don’t try to get out of it,’ she scolded, impatiently.

  ‘Sorry. You first then. Go ahead.’

  ‘Something’s worrying me.’ That gained my full attention: I reached round her with the remote and switched off the TV. ‘It’s been a long time since Mum died, hasn’t it?’

  ‘You know it has. Eight years; you were five when it happened.’

  ‘And now I’m thirteen. Does that make me different in some way?’

  I was puzzled. ‘No, why should it?’

  ‘Are you worried about me,’ she pressed on, ‘about my emotional development?’

  ‘No. Come on, kid, stop throwing big words at me. What’s your problem?’

  ‘This is. We’ve come all this way together, Dad, and you’ve been brilliant. But I know you’re lonely too. Have you finally had enough of bringing me up on your own?’

  My reaction was instant. ‘No way!’ I protested.

  ‘Or do you think I need a mum?’ she asked. ‘Because if you do, you’re wrong. I don’t need anybody else; just you. If you think you’ve met somebody you really want, that’s good. But if you’re thinking it’s what I want, you’re wrong. Honestly, I don’t think I’d like to share this house with another woman, not even Alison.’

  Another woman! This was my baby talking to me, but that’s how I’d better get used to thinking of her. I reached out and took her hand. ‘That’s me told, good and proper. For the record, I haven’t been running auditions, honest. I promise you, if I ever think about getting married again, and you’re still living at home, I’ll let you pop the question to whoever it is. In the meantime, though, does it make you feel awkward when Alison stays the night?’

  She looked at me as if she was the adult and I was the child. ‘Pops,’ she sighed. ‘I watch EastEnders. I know what sex is. If you must know, you bringing someone home made me feel more grown-up. It makes me feel that you’re starting to treat me more like an adult. But,’ she said, firmly, ‘if you bring different people home, don’t expect me to keep one of them secret from the other.’

  I leaned back in my chair and looked at her, a little awestruck. ‘God,’ I whispered, ‘what did I do to get you?’ She opened her mouth to answer, but I held up a hand. ‘Enough! Let that stay unsaid at least. Go on,’ I told her. ‘Get your glad rags on. We’re due at the Roseberry at seven thirty.’

  As she left, I ran my hand over my chin and decided that I’d been a bit too far from my Philishave that morning. On my way to my bedroom, I noticed for the first time that the light on the phone was flashing, indicating that I had a message. In fact, there were two: the first was from Alex’s sole surviving grandparent, Thornton Graham, my father-in-law, asking whether he could visit next day. The second was from Alison. ‘Bob,’ she’d begun, but gone no further before hanging up. I called her back from my bedroom extension. She sounded impatient when she answered.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  ‘What for?’ she snapped, then took a deep breath. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I should be apologising. You caught me on my way out the door, that’s all.’

  ‘You rang me.’

  ‘Yes, then I lost the bottle to say what I meant to.’

  ‘You want to try again?’

  ‘Mmm.’ She’d begun to sound like herself again. ‘It’s another sorry, for my ridiculous performance at the Sheraton, flouncing off like that just because I catch you with a poppet on your arm. I wanted to warn you before she finds my knickers drying in your bathroom, that’s all.’

  I laughed. ‘Don’t worry, I checked. Alison,’ I said, quickly, before she took me seriously, ‘do you want to know who she is?’

  ‘If you want to tell me.’

  I did. ‘She caught the six o’clock train home,’ I finished, ‘after she’d promised Alex a copy of the hit single of the year, on top of the autographed piccie.’

  ‘And now I feel like an idiot,’ she moaned. ‘Thanks a bunch.’

  ‘Just as well we’re not serious about each other, eh?’

  ‘I wasn’t kidding about that, Bob.’

  ‘Me neither. Now that’s off our chests, do you want to come out here tomorrow night?’

  ‘Let’s see how hung-over I am in the morning after a session with Leona.’

  ‘Okay,’ I told her. ‘Call me when your head clears.’

  Before changing to go out, I phoned Thornie to confirm his visit. Alex was pleased when I told her; we had virtually no extended family (she didn’t know that she had an uncle on my side) and that made her cherish her grandfather and aunt even more.

  He was an early riser, was Grandpa Graham. Alex and I had barely cleared away the breakfast things when he arrived, at ten thirty, having driven all the way from Carluke, by a slightly longer route than necessary. He never drove past the accident site; instead he took the A198 to Dirleton Toll, and stopped off at the cemetery to lay flowers on Myra’s grave, before heading for Gullane.

  Alex was looking out for him, and went to greet him as his car pulled up outside. I strolled out after her. ‘Hey, Thornie, how you doing?’ I asked, as we shook hands. He was sixty-eight, but his grip was still strong, a relic of his younger days as a steel worker, before moving up to management, and a reminder that he had spent most of his retirement on Lanark golf course. ‘Have you brought your clubs?’ I asked, rhetorically, I assumed, for he always did whether I’d told him to or not.

  ‘No,’ he replied, taking me completely by surprise.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Something had to be.

  He nodded towards his granddaughter, who was leading the way down the path. ‘I’ll tell
you later.’

  The day was warming up, and the early summer that often comes to Scotland in May was holding firm, so I decided that the garden was in play again. ‘Alex,’ I said, ‘you’re on coffee duty . . . proper coffee too, not instant.’

  ‘Aw, Dad.’

  ‘No arguments. It’s your turn. And don’t use the stuff in the packet either. I bought some beans in the deli; grind them and use them.’

  Thornton came to help me as I fetched the chairs from the shed, and set them around the patio table. As he unfolded the third, I took a closer look at him; I couldn’t miss the dark circles under his eyes, a new addition to his weather-beaten features, and noticed for the first time that his breathing was laboured. ‘Tell me,’ I murmured, as we sat.

  He looked at me, and smiled. ‘Did it ever occur to you that statistics are always about other people?’

  It hadn’t, since I lived with crime stats, and targets, but I nodded nonetheless.

  ‘I thought that, until I heard someone on telly discussing road accident figures after my daughter had died, and I realised that she was one of them. In time, her mother fell ill, and became one too. Even after that, though . . . we’re bombarded with statistics, so many that we disregard them. For example, there are the figures about smoking, and what it does to people. Not to you yourself, though, always other people. I often used to wonder whether it was one particular cigarette that did the damage, and eventually I decided that it was, and that the odds against you pulling that one from the packet were still pretty long. When I go to the bookie’s, Bob, I always back favourites, yet I’m not a rich man, so I should know that they don’t always pay off.’

  By that time, I knew what he was going to tell me, but I waited, I let him take his time. ‘Mine’s finally come up, son,’ he said. ‘I’ve drawn the fatal fag. I’ve been diagnosed with lung cancer.’

  I looked up at the blue sky, expecting to see dark clouds moving across it, but it was clear and unblemished. ‘What are they going to do about it?’ I asked him. ‘Surgery?’

  ‘They say no. They say it’s a big tumour and that it’s already spread to my lymphatic system; when that happens, the knife isn’t an option, they say.’

  ‘Who’s saying this, exactly?’

  ‘It seems to be the unanimous view. I asked to see a surgeon as well as the physician who examined me first, but she told me the same thing; so did my GP. Instead, they want to give me chemotherapy, and maybe radiotherapy as well.’

  ‘Good,’ I exclaimed. ‘That means they’re being positive about your chances.’

  ‘That’s the buzz word, Bob,’ he murmured. ‘Positivity. They said that about Mina, even as they told me she was going to die within a week. But, now that I’m a statistic myself, I’m more interested in them, ye see. I really interrogated my GP, like you do with a baddie, but he stuck to the party line, then he started to go on about prolonging life. So I went to the library. You can get on this internet thing there. It’s got a lot of information, and the library people show you how to look for it. What it told me is that statistically . . . back to that word again . . . I’m a rank outsider, twenty to one against lasting even a couple of years. I’ve never backed a twenty-to-one shot in my life, son. And that’s with the treatment,’ he added, ‘which is no picnic, as I saw when Mina was ill. The chemotherapy makes you sick without other drugs to control it, and they don’t always work.’ He touched his silver head. ‘The radiation makes you sick too, and it makes your hair fall out. So what will I be if I have it? A baldy old man that can’t stop throwing up, and can’t get any further than the practice putting green on the golf course.’

  ‘You’ve got to try, though,’ I insisted.

  ‘Why? Jean, and Alexis, and you are all I’ve got to live for. But I don’t want any of you, least of all that wee one in there, to see me like that. I wouldn’t wish it on you, and I’ve got too much pride to want to look in the mirror and see a bloke I don’t recognise staring back at me. So I’m going to take the other option. They call it palliative care; that means giving me painkillers and such as and when I need them, and keeping me as comfortable as possible, while the disease runs its course.’

  ‘And how long will that be?’

  ‘That’s the beauty of it,’ he chuckled, an action that triggered a long, racking cough; it hurt me just to hear it, so God knows what it did to him. ‘It might be longer than if I had the treatment. They can’t say for sure that it won’t. However, when I pressed my own doctor, he guessed three months, maximum.’

  I was struggling to take it in. Three days earlier, I’d looked, close to, at Marlon Watson’s broken body and accepted it as part of my daily routine, yet this, out of the blue, was overwhelming. ‘Jesus, Thornie,’ I murmured, feeling close to tears. ‘What are we going to tell Alex?’

  ‘Well, what are you going to tell me?’ she asked as she emerged from the kitchen carrying a tray, with a coffee pot, three mugs, a milk jug and a packet of the chocolate ginger biscuits that I thought I’d stashed out of her sight.

  ‘That Grandpa’s going away for a while,’ Thornton replied.

  ‘Away?’ she repeated, looking at him, full of curiosity as she held the tray for me to unload it. ‘Where?’

  ‘Places I’ve never been. I’ve decided to go on one last great journey.’

  ‘To where?’ she persisted.

  ‘That’s the beauty of magical mystery tours,’ Thornie had been a Beatles fan from their earliest days, ‘you never know where you’re going until you get there.’

  ‘How do you know you’ll like it?’ She was intrigued.

  ‘That’s called faith, love. But I will. That’s why they’re always magical. Think about it. If anyone organised crap mystery tours, how long would they stay in business?’

  She laughed, and hugged him. ‘Were you a hippie when you were young, Grandpa?’

  ‘Lassie,’ he chuckled, and only just caught another paroxysm, ‘when I was young we didn’t have hippies. We had ration books and national service. It’s only now I’m old that I’m getting a chance to catch up on that stuff.’

  ‘Will you send me a postcard?’

  ‘Sure. Now give me some of that coffee, Alexis, before it gets cold. It’s the only reason I come here, you know, your coffee.’

  The truth sank in, and hit me hard: he’d come to say goodbye. I had to get up from the table and go back indoors, quickly, before my daughter saw my face. I went to my bedroom, knowing that she wouldn’t follow me in there, even if she did wonder why I’d left the two of them. It took me a few minutes to pull myself together. Before I went back outside, I changed my shirt, giving myself a cover story if she was wondering why I’d gone so suddenly.

  I didn’t need it. When I rejoined them, Thornton and his granddaughter were in full flow. ‘What’s this she’s telling me?’ he said. ‘About you turning into a Lothario?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ I protested. ‘He was a very shifty type, the original.’ And what was I yesterday? I thought.

  ‘I must listen to this new friend of yours, Alexis.’

  ‘I don’t know if you can, Grandpa. She’s on a local station.’

  ‘But you never know, the signal might reach Carluke, even if it’s not supposed to. They can’t put up walls to keep radio waves out.’ My mobile sounded. ‘Any more,’ he continued with barely a pause, ‘than you can keep them from reaching those things. They can be switched off though, Bob.’

  ‘Not this one, Thornie. It has to stay on.’

  ‘You should nag your father into smelling a few of those roses,’ I heard him say, as I flipped it open and headed for the foot of the garden.

  ‘Yes,’ I grunted, irritably.

  ‘Is it a bad time, boss?’ Jeff Adam asked.

  ‘It’s as good as it’s going to get for a while,’ I replied, ‘but not your problem. You’re the guy in the office on a Sunday while I’m in my garden. What’s up?’

  ‘That Transit van’s been found,’ he announced.

  �
��Progress, thank Christ. Where?’

  ‘Newcastle, but don’t get excited. It’s not going to be any use to us; any personal traces that might have been in it are destroyed. It was found in the early hours on a piece of open ground near St James’s Park, set alight. The fire brigade turned out, but it was practically melted by then. They’re taking no chances.’

  ‘Do we know who “they” are yet? Any joy with the auctioneers?’

  ‘Afraid not; we’ll get nothing from there before Monday. So no progress, I’m afraid, other than we can stop looking for the van.’