Laidlaw

3

His hands, illumined in the lights he passed, rose and fell helplessly on the steering. They were enormous hands that had driven rivets on Clydeside for thirty years. They weren’t used to being helpless. Just now they signalled an anger that, lacking a focus, took in everything. Bud Lawson was angry with Laidlaw, the police, his daughter, his wife, the city itself.

He resented the route by which he was having to go home: along the motorway to the Clyde Tunnel Junction, right into Anniesland, left out Great Western Road. The first part of it reminded him too strongly of what they had done to the city he used to know. Great loops of motorway displaced his past. It was like a man having his guts replaced with plastic tubing. He thought again of the Gorbals, the crowded tenements, the noise, the feeling that if you stretched too far in bed you could scratch your neighbour’s head. To him it felt like a lost happiness. He wished himself back there as if that would put right Jennifer’s absence.

He knew it was serious simply because she wouldn’t have dared to do this to him if she could help it. She knew the rules. Only once before had she tried to break them: the time she was going out with the Catholic. But he had put a stop to that. He hadn’t forgotten and he never forgave. His nature ran on tramlines. It only had one route. If you weren’t on it, you were no part of his life.

It was that inflexibility which trapped him now. In a sense, Jennifer was already lost to him. Even if she came back later today, she had done enough in his terms to destroy her relationship with him. With a kind of brutal sentimentality, he was thinking over past moments when she had still been what he wanted her to be. He remembered her first time at the shore when she was three. She hadn’t liked the sand. She curled her feet away from it and cried. He remembered the Christmas he had bought her a bike. She fell over it getting to a rag-doll Sadie had made for her. He remembered her starting work. He thought of the times he had waited for her to come in at nights.

He had passed the Goodyear Tyre Factory and was among the three-storey grey-stone tenements of Drumchapel. They didn’t feel like home. He stopped, got out and locked the car.

He came in to Sadie at the fire. She was wearing the housecoat out of his sister Maggie’s club catalogue. On her its flowers looked withered. She looked up at him the way she always did, slightly askance, as if he were so big he only left her the edges of any room to sidle in. Her very presence was an apology that irritated him.

‘Is there ony word, Bud?’ she said.

He stared at the tray-cloth he had pinned above the mantelpiece, where King Billy sat on his prancing charger.

‘Ah went tae the polis.’

‘Oh, ye didny, Bud.’

‘Whit the hell wid Ah dae? Ma lassie’s missin’.’

‘What did they say?’

He sat down and stared at the fire.

‘By Christ, there better be somethin’ wrang wi’ ’er efter this.’ He looked at the clock. It was a quarter to seven. ‘If there’s no somethin’ wrang wi’ her the noo, there’ll be somethin’ wrang wi’ her when Ah get ma haunds oan ’er.’

‘Don’t say that, Bud.’

‘Shut yer mooth, wumman.’

His silence filled the shabby room. He took off his scarf and dropped it on the chair behind him. Sadie sat rocking very gently, making a cradle of her worry. He looked across at her. She looked so gormless that a suspicion formed in him slowly.

‘Ye widny know anythin’ that Ah don’t, wid ye?’

‘Whit d’ye mean?’

‘Ye know whit Ah mean. She’s never done anythin’ like this in her life afore. She’s no up tae something that Ah don’t know aboot, is she?’

‘Bud. Hoo can ye think that? Ah widny hide anythin’ from you.’

‘Ye tried it before. The time she wis goin’ aboot with the Catholic. Till Ah put a stoap tae it.’

‘Ah never knew aboot that till you found oot.’

‘Aye, that’s your story. An’ ye’re stickin’ tae it. It’ll no be tellin’ any the two o’ ye if ye’re in cahoots aboot somethin’. Ah’m warnin’ ye.’

He stared at her and her skinny obsequiousness offended him. One child. That was all she had been able to produce. And four miscarriages, small parcels of blood and bones that hadn’t got enough from her to make a human being. There wasn’t enough room in her to hold another child.

Seeing him watching her, she talked a smokescreen.

‘Wid ye like a cup o’ tea while we’re waitin’, Bud? Will Ah make ye wan?’

Since he didn’t say no, she went through to make it.

A baffled rage fermented in him. Normally, he went headfirst through whatever threatened him. But this was different. This was squaring up to fog. The difference pumped up the pressure of his anger into something awesome.

Sadie had kept the fire going. It was dying down. He lifted the poker and halted with it in his hand. Jennifer had wanted them to have a gas-fire put in. But he liked coal. On that irrelevant thought he blacked out into a lonely fury.

When he came out of it, he stared at the poker twisted to a staple in his hands. It was an I.O.U. made out to someone.