Come to Harm

eleven

At half-past three she was outside the flat, watching for Viola. Should she take the little girl’s hand when they crossed the road? Would that be too intrusive, maybe? Too patronising?

But when they reached the crossing place, Viola slipped her hand into Keiko’s as if out of habit and kept hold of it when they reached the other side. Keiko kept her fingers very still, as if trying not to scare away a small creature who was taking crumbs from her.

“Martha Anderson in my class thought you were called Cake-hole,” said Viola in a scornful voice, then she looked up to check that Keiko was laughing. “Why don’t you wear a kimono?”

“I’ve got a kimono with me,” said Keiko. “For a special occasion. Like a kilt.”

“Kilts are scratchy,” said Viola. “I had to wear one at Miss Munro’s. I’m glad I’m going to proper dancing now, and not Miss Munro’s stupid baby dancing. I’m glad you can take me.” She squeezed Keiko’s hand. Keiko relaxed her fingers. “I can do the money on the bus if you get stuck, you know. It’s two pounds sixty-five for you and a pound for me. And I’ve got my own pound in my purse.”

“Thank you,” said Keiko. She squeezed Viola’s hand back. “Let’s get it ready before the bus comes. That’s what I do.”

At the bus stop were two young women Keiko had never seen before, who didn’t speak to her although they both turned slightly as she joined them so that they could shoot glances at her shoes and clothes out of the sides of their eyes. Viola looked them up and down once and then turned away and began to practice tap steps, counting under her breath, her bag slapping against her back as she bounced from foot to foot. Under the spiked glances, Keiko checked through her own bag as though for something she thought she might have forgotten, then looked up at the sound of an engine slowing. A white van had drawn up and Malcolm Poole was leaning across the seats as the window slid down.

“Where you off to?” he asked. Viola stopped dancing and came and put her hand back into Keiko’s.

“We’re going into the city on the bus,” said Keiko. “I’m going to the university and Viola is going to Tollcross to her dancing school.”

“I’m going right past,” said Malcolm and, shifting the van out of gear and unbuckling his seatbelt, he hauled himself across and opened the passenger door. Keiko looked down at Viola and hesitated. She glanced with silent appeal at the two young women, but they studied the ground, smirking. Then she looked back at Malcolm.

“Thank you so much, but…” She was groping for the turn of phrase she needed, knew it was one she had learned, but it was gone. “You’re very kind,” she said. “We’re most grateful.” Then, her mind still blank, she stepped forward and hoisted Viola up before climbing in behind her, hearing a cackle of laughter from the bus stop as they pulled away.

“Can I sit beside the window?” asked Viola, already squeezing past and settling down at the extreme edge of the seat. Keiko busied herself with the seatbelts, Viola’s first, pulling it in as tight as it would go and buckling it across the little girl’s chest, so that she was pinned back with her legs poking straight out, her feet wagging gently. Keiko’s own seatbelt buckle was doubled up just under the outside edge of Malcolm’s nearest thigh. She held the strap over her body with one hand and braced her feet against the floor.

“Here,” said Malcolm, in his quiet honking voice. He bent his whole body towards her and she stiffened until she realised that he was reaching his arm around his leg and rummaging underneath himself. He held out the buckle to her and she fastened herself in with her head down.

“What kind of dancing school is it, Viola?” Malcolm asked.

“Everything except disco,” said Viola. “Are there dead animals in the back?”

“No,” he said. “I’m on my way to get some, though.”

“Yuk,” said Viola, “We’re getting the bus home, Keiko, eh no?” Keiko laughed and gently pinched one of Viola’s skinny knees.

Malcolm, she noticed, was slumped slightly to stop his head from brushing the roof. He really was very tall, a fact that should be plain but somehow got hidden in the overwhelming girth of him. And his girth combined with the slumping meant that his stomach jutted out around the steering wheel and he had to breathe in sharply when he needed to turn it so it seemed as though it was the sudden jerked breaths that were steering the van and not his hands at all.

When the silence had gone on beyond all normalcy, when Keiko thought that Malcolm must be able to hear her thinking about him, she looked up at him with a bright smile on her face, giving a little preparatory cough. His hair was as dark as Murray’s but longer and swept to the side in wet-looking straps, like seaweed out of water. His face was still except that, although he breathed through his nose with his teeth shut, his bottom lip hung open under its weight and trembled at every bump in the road.

“Are you busy at the uni today or just killing time waiting for the wee one?” he asked suddenly, as they joined a main road and the van sped up.

“I have one or two little things I need to do. I…”

“I just wondered if you wanted to come with me?” He paused, but Keiko said nothing. “To the meat wholesalers. It’s really interesting.” He hefted himself round and looked at Keiko, who could feel her face draining and had to make herself blink her eyes before they dried.

“The slaughterhouse?”

“Just to the market, not to the processing end.”

“I really have to get a few things done,” she said. “And I wouldn’t want to put you to any trouble, thanks all the same.” This, she realised, was the phrase she had needed at the bus stop. Too late now.

“I hear you were out at Kenny’s last night,” Malcolm said, smiling as he checked in his rearview mirror and waved his thanks to the driver behind who had held back and let him in.

“I like their pickled onions,” said Viola. “They’re great big mambo ones, not like those wee white ones Granny gets that you couldn’t choke on.”

“You would make a good little Japanese girl, Viola,” said Keiko. “Sour flavours are very dear to us.”

“I do their dripping,” Malcolm said.

“Eh?” said Viola.

“The Imperiolos. I render their dripping for them. My father used to do it and I took over. It’s nice to be nice.”

“What’s ‘render their dripping’, Malcolm?” said Viola.

“You roast up all fatty scraps, in a hot oven and the pure fat drips out and then you can use it for frying in,” Malcolm said.

“For frying fish?” Keiko asked him.

“Oh yes, best there is. It’s clarified ghee in the curries so I can’t help them with that, and they use veg oil in the Chinese, but it’s best pure dripping in the chippy. Gorgeous stuff. My father taught me.”

“Yuk, yuk, double yuk,” said Viola. Keiko knew that she should scold the little girl for rudeness but could not bring herself to.

“And I tell you what else,” said Malcolm. “The dried scraps at the end are absolutely braw. Bit of salt and pepper.”

“Yuk, yuk, double yuk, and blergh,” said Viola, making a very convincing vomiting noise.

“Yum, yum, double yum, and save me some for later,” returned Malcolm. “There’s nothing wrong with a bit of fat.”

Viola’s eyes lit up with devilment, but Keiko broke in before she could answer. “I went for a walk to the glen this morning,” she said. “Murray told me you used to swim in the scuddy there.”

The van lurched and Viola let out her held laughter with a fizzing sound, like a bottle opening.

“Right,” said Malcolm. “Did he?”

“Yes, under the waterfall? In the pool? The scuddy pool, is it?”

“Ah, right,” said Malcolm.

They dropped Viola off first, double-parked on a narrow, bustling street. Keiko fumbled the door open for her to jump down and they watched her slip into the surge of little girls going into the building. Malcolm waited until her bright ponytail had disappeared through the doors before he moved, ignoring the horn blasts and revving behind him, then he turned the van and set off through a warren of back roads.

“I should probably tell you,” he said, without looking at her, “before you say it again to someone who matters. Scuddy isn’t a kind of pool. Swimming in the scuddy means… no trunks.”

“Oh,” said Keiko, feeling the familiar wave of warmth flooding into her cheeks; she had never changed colour so much in her life as in the last week, between the gaffes and the Gaelic coffee.

“Don’t worry,” said Malcolm. “My father used to say, if you can’t keep your foot out your mouth, you could always get work in a circus.”

Keiko couldn’t help laughing. “It’s nice to hear you speak of him,” she said.

“It’s nice to get the chance to,” said Malcolm. “Murray and my mother…”

“I know,” said Keiko. “I made Murray sad this morning. No-not sad, but upset. Not thinking, I said how nice it was in Painchton, how close and settled everyone is!”

“That wasn’t about Dad,” said Malcolm after a long pause.

“I think it was,” said Keiko. The next pause was even longer.

“No, see Murray broke up with his girlfriend. And he’s not really got over it. He’s been sick to the back teeth of Painchton ever since then.”

Keiko groaned. “That would make more sense, actually.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, he talked about a puzzle he had to solve and maybe I could help him-doing the kind of thing I do.”

Malcolm, suddenly, was as still as a stone and the van slowed as though even his pedal foot had frozen. Keiko turned and looked up at him, at the Easter Island set of his face and the dark emptiness of his eyes. The van stopped completely.

“We’re here,” Malcolm said, his voice softer than ever. Keiko looked around and recognised the ornate lump of a building they were parked beside, just across the square from the psychology department. She must have imagined the freezing-she didn’t know how to drive and couldn’t tell what sudden bursts of concentration it might take to stop in the middle of a busy city. Thanking him, she jumped out and slammed the door, then stood and waved as he pulled away. She must surely be imagining what she was seeing now, the effort it was taking Malcolm to heave a smile onto his face and raise his arm to wave back to her.

She heard her mother’s voice. The great expert on the human mind, Keko-chan? You could be Sigmund Freud himself-but even monkeys fall out of trees.