Laidlaw

35

They had made love twice. The first time was hurried and desperate, less a love-letter than a note for the milkman. It was a quick inventory of basic equipment and a fitting of the essential component parts together, followed by about a minute-and-a-half of grunting mayhem.

After it, they lay in the darkness, trying to remember how to breathe. It was several minutes before she managed to speak.

‘Would you mind arresting yourself for assault and battery?’ she said.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

He started to laugh.

‘By the way,’ he said. ‘Here’s your left tit back. It just came away in my hand.’

They were both laughing. She tapered hers off into an operatic groan.

‘My God,’ she said. ‘I feel so sore. I wish you’d taken your boots off.’

‘It’s so long since I’ve seen you. I had a wee bit bother finding my way around.’

He put his arm round her and thought about it.

‘When you can’t pick the lock,’ he said, ‘you’ve got to batter the door down.’

‘Yes. But I left it open.’

‘I’m so virile, I didn’t notice.’

She waited patiently for his head to come back from a walk around his guilt. His complexity didn’t annoy her. She accepted that the situation was more fraught for him. The only trammel to her love was the fear of causing hurt to him through disrupting his life irrevocably. Her right hand stroked his stomach, an insistent but gentle presence.

The second time was a slow discovery. They had lain face to face, saying what came into their heads and breathing on each other. He lipped her ear. Her hand defined the inside of his thigh. Gradually they became mouths that went out on each other, blindly exploring. They were two roundabout journeys looking for a meeting-point. Their mouths took bearings from a lot of places as they went. Beneath the lips of each the other distended, mysterious as a continent, until he was coming at her, manic as a conquistador with a new world to colonise. It was as if he was fighting an ebbing tide to come ashore, where she reached for him. His mouth was talking, making wild threats that she was welcoming. When they finally rolled over, separate but having merged, they didn’t know how long it had been. They just knew it felt exactly long enough.

The fierceness he had felt towards her cleansed his sense of her. He saw her as beautiful. They lay as if they had fallen very far — luxuriously fractured. It was enough.

‘All better now,’ she said, and giggled. ‘You may have been rough before. But you’ve got good ointment.’

Laidlaw stirred, reached across and switched on the bedside light. He took his cigarettes and matches.

‘Can I have one of those, please?’ Jan asked.

Then it had been at-home time, a delicious parody of domesticity — pillows improvised lengthwise into armchairs, Laidlaw padding about like a naked butler getting whiskies, the two of them ensconced smoking, her breasts appearing coyly over the bedclothes.

Now it was that unpolluted feeling that Laidlaw appreciated, when your head is free of fog and thoughts come out of your mouth natural and fully formed. He was lying on top of the covers with the ashtray balanced on his stomach.

‘Be careful where you put your ash, love,’ he said. ‘We don’t want to start a forest fire.’

‘Delusions of grandeur. Has your guilt arrived yet, by the way?’

‘Who said it ever left?’

‘You’re amazing. It’s a sport, love.’

‘Aye. But it’s a blood sport.’

‘Come on.’

‘True. Kisses are wee assaults. Just turning towards someone is turning away from somebody else. There’s always hurt.’

‘Oh God. I see John Knox is back. Goodbye, Don Juan.’

‘You’re just immoral.’ He blew smoke in her face. ‘Amoral, maybe. You don’t see the implications. That a man of my deep sensitivity has to cope with.’

But his face did look sad.

‘It’s a service industry, darling. For a lot of people.’

‘For you?’

‘I’ve shown you enough to make that question an insult.

Say “Let’s live together,” and I’ll do it. It’s all right. That’s not a proposition, just a fact. There’s nobody I want but you. There may be later. Meantime I’ll take what I can get from you.’

‘Your Laidlaw period.’

‘What are you trying to do? Justify yourself by cheapening me?’

‘No. But why?’

‘Because there’s not a lot like you about. So far you’re the only one of you I’ve met. You’re an improbable person.’

‘Everybody is.’

‘Not true. I know a lot of people who’re imitating one another.’

‘They must be kidding. The results may look the same. But in every case the contortions it took to get there are unique.’

He had put out his cigarette and lit another. Jan reached for a fresh one and lit it from the stub, which she dropped into the ashtray. Laidlaw had to put it out. Watching his tenseness, Jan wanted to encourage him to talk if only to release the congestion in his head.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, I suppose we try to make ourselves parodies of everybody else,’ he said. ‘Because it’s safer. Owning up’s a terrible chance to take. That way you don’t know who you are until you happen. And then you’re lumbered with it.’

‘How do you mean?’

He wasn’t sure.

‘Like whoever killed that lassie. Maybe that’s what happened to him.’

They both were silent for a time, just smoking and drinking.

‘I mean, who knows what went wrong?’ he said. ‘Love is such a violent thing. For me it is, anyway. It’s a murderous skill to practise at any time. In a bed, especially. Like trying to conduct a thunderstorm. With your wee baton of flesh.’

‘A thunderstorm? I hadn’t noticed.’

‘No. I’m not presuming. It may hit you like a zephyr. But it comes out of me a bit differently. Anyway, I did say a wee baton.’

He was silent. He was admitting to himself how much he cared for her, experiencing that lonely part of loving, the bit that you can’t say. It came to her as just brooding, not something particularly to be encouraged, especially in him. He could do that anytime.

‘Don’t sulk. I admit that when you’re on form I feel slightly surrounded. Like a city you were trying to sack.’

‘I knew I was getting through to you.’ He sighed.

‘You have your faith. I’ll have my instincts. When I touch you, I know the difference. When I hear you, it’s a private station. Nobody else I know is sending out those signals.’

‘It’s mainly static.’

‘That’s what makes me listen hard. Your lovely complications. They rivet me.’

‘Nice lady.’

‘How are the children?’

‘They’re all right.’

They lay letting the children come between them. Jan wondered what they were like. She had an image of each but had never been able to check it against the reality. She wondered if she ever would.

‘How is the case going?’ she asked.

Her drink was finished. She put her empty glass beside the bed.

‘It isn’t yet. Sexual murder’s so different. Everything you do stays somehow irrelevant, just a process you’re involved in. Even if we solve the case, I’ll feel worse than I did before. Lumbered with information I can’t ignore. And I can’t understand. As if I’ve been reading God’s mail.’

He started to laugh. It struck him again how easy it was to laugh after making love.

‘It’s ludicrous. Just about the entire corpus of Glasgow police in frenetic pursuit of its own ignorance. Because even if we get him, what is it we’ll have found? We haven’t a clue. And the thing is I don’t believe there’s anybody can tell us what it means. It’s just that we have to do something. And then the courts’ll have to do something. Still. Who thinks the law has anything to do with justice? It’s what we have because we can’t have justice.’

‘Good night, Aristotle.’

You had to shut the door eventually on that stuff, Jan decided, and give yourself some room just to be. She gave him her cigarette. He stubbed it out and then his own. He finished his drink and put the glass and the ashtray on the bedside cabinet. She blew ash from his stomach and he came under the covers. But he still sat upright, feeling the headboard bite into his back through the propped pillow and watching the lighter square of wall where the mirror had been before it was moved.

‘Maybe the only answer to a crime like this isn’t arrest and conviction. Maybe it’s for the rest of us to try and love well. Not amputate that part. Just try to heal the world in other places.’

She had lain down again. Her hand had happened casually to come to rest between his legs.

‘Do you fancy trying to heal the world some more?’ she asked. ‘I’m not randy. Just full of self-sacrifice.’

Laidlaw put out the light.

‘No chance,’ he said. ‘But you can watch me sleeping if you like. I’m a very sexy sleeper.’