Strange Loyalties

30

Iknew Drumchapel, alias the Drum. A lot of people there wrestled with the bleakness of a badly conceived place. The decrepit council houses were a past promise of social improvement that had turned into the fact of deprivation. Today I saw dogs roam like the disinherited spirit of the place. Jennifer Lawson, whom I had first met as a brutalised corpse, had lived here. The place had its associations for me. But Michael Preston was not one of them.

I had my sense of him though. Television can make us familiar with strangers. We often look at the faces on it with more concentration than we look on the faces of friends. He was urbane and very articulate and he appeared to put that articulacy at the service of more than his own career. I had read an article about him in a newspaper which claimed that he had never made a programme he didn’t believe in utterly. I had always liked him. He seemed sincere and his voice had the rhythm of natural speech — not the way voices sometimes sound on the box, as if they had been punctuated by computer. His public voice had the tone of integrity. If his private voice matched it, conversation with him should be less of a pin-ball game than it was with Dave Lyons.

I drove past Ardmore Crescent, where Jennifer Lawson had lived. That was the first case I had been on with Brian Harkness — strange bonus from a bad death. I worked my way through the cold geometry of streets that were like an industrial estate manufacturing disillusion. I knew I had found the house when I saw three cars parked outside, two of them estate cars. Someone had visitors, and visitors who needed space in their vehicles for a lot of equipment. As I locked the car, I saw a television light at an upstairs window.

The outside door of the house was ajar. Pushing it open, I saw a young man coming down the stairs. He was wearing jeans and a sweater and a Barbour jacket. He was carrying a canister of film. He nodded to me on the way past. He was with the BBC and obviously thought that in some way I came with the house. I decided to accept the freedom of the building he had bestowed on me.

The uncarpeted stairway led up to a long, dim hallway at the end of which the door was slightly open. Voices came from beyond it. The wooden floor creaked as I stepped on it, already haunted with departed people. I opened the door to the living-room and went in.

Strange image of the times: a kind of theatre made out of real hardship; designer deprivation. The room was so raw as hardly to suggest an interior at all but rather one of those make-believe houses children may put together on a waste lot from other people’s cast-offs. The walls bore the scars of previous failed attempts at decoration, overlaid with the scrawled graffiti of names. The uncovered floor had one patch of carpet in the middle — a raft of identity sinking in a sea of anonymity. A burst sofa and two chairs were all the furniture, looking as if they hadn’t been delivered but dumped.

Yet surrounding this construct of serious need was enough expensive equipment, had it been sold, to make the room a showpiece. There were powerful lights, sound machines, an impressive film-camera mounted on a tripod. Around these stood more than half a dozen people. Some of them obviously were there with the equipment. The others, two teenage boys, were friends who were there to see the show. Each side apparently took me as belonging to the other and my presence was barely remarked.

Beside the camera, out of range of its lens, Michael Preston sat on a metal box. The object of his attention, as of everybody else’s, sat on the sofa opposite him. They were a boy who might have been eighteen and a girl who could be hardly that. Between them a girl of maybe one year old was sitting. The child was the true denizen of the room, someone already being defined by her habitat. The pinched features had faint sores around the mouth and the unchildlike listlessness of the eyes seemed to lag behind the movements around them, a cripple trying to follow a parade. Even someone insensitive enough to miss the statement the room made about the way some people live couldn’t have missed its meaning as reflected in her face.

From Michael Preston’s interview, which was already in progress, I learned that the two older children were the parents of the third. The mother was wan and shy and didn’t say much. The father had the kind of youthful face one glance at which made me think, with a sinking feeling, that they could book the cell now. It might lie empty for a few years yet but it was going to be needed. I liked his face. It was a ‘so what?’ face. He had seen enough already to know that he wasn’t exactly born to win and, if his life was never going to have much in the way of material substance, it could at least have style. The old felt hat was a part of it. The expression beneath it was saying to every stranger, ‘Doesn’t bother me’.

Their names, it emerged, were Julian and Marlene. I wondered what unconsciously shared dream in different council houses had spawned the poignancy of the names. We call you Julian and Marlene and, by the sympathetic magic that is in names, you will grow mysteriously to fit them and be different from us. But the only difference was perhaps that, while their parents’ poorness had been part of a cohesive community that gave at least the support of shared values, theirs was part of a widespread rootlessness. The magic hadn’t worked the way it was supposed to. But then a few of the essential ingredients had been missing, like opportunity and social justice.

Michael Preston conducted the interview gently, establishing a trust. His accent gradually modified itself until it was hardly distinguishable from Julian’s. Seen in the flesh, he didn’t match the sense I had had of him. He looked smaller and more vulnerable. But then fame’s just borrowed clothes. I can’t imagine that anyone’s reputation fits them.

Listening to Julian, I heard the banality of hopelessness. Futility had become so familiar to him that it was a casual idiom in his mouth. He told of a temporary job he had had, the small amount of money they had to try and live on, the incidence of mugging in the area, their incompetence in bringing up the child. The appallingness of his situation was muffled by two things: his cocky self-defeating acceptance of it and the mediating requirements of the camera. His life was being processed into a piece of television.

The way in which the reality of his life was being made over into a viewable artefact had come home to me when the camera-man suddenly said, ‘Oh God! No! Stop it there.’ There was, he said, ‘a hair in the gate’. The drama of his performance shattered any atmosphere of naturalness Michael Preston had managed to create. When the interview resumed, Marlene had become terrified of the moods of the camera and kept glancing at it as if it might sprout a headful of hair this time. Julian, invited to repeat the last thing he had been saying, started not to talk but to perform.

Looking on at the end of the interview, I felt I recognised where I had been several times this week — a place where people knew unjustifiable things had happened and were happening but had tried to give the truth they knew elocution lessons, so that form became the criterion, not content. I began to worry about the man who was central to the shaping of the truth that was emerging here. I didn’t want Michael Preston to give me a carefully packaged version of what I sought to know. As soon as he said, ‘That’ll do us. Cut’, I crossed towards him. I was beside him as he straightened up from his box.

‘Mr Preston,’ I said. ‘I’m Jack Laidlaw.’

His eyes took a moment to come back from his interview. He looked at the child, he looked at me.

‘It doesn’t matter how pure you think your motivations are,’ he said. He was talking to himself. ‘You always feel you’re exploiting people in these things. You’re Scott’s brother.’

‘That’s right. Could I talk to you for a minute?’

‘Well, just a minute. We’re going to set up outside for a piece to camera. I’ll have to look at my notes.’

While they were clearing up, we wandered through to the kitchen. It was no more homely than the living-room had been. You could believe that the main thing they cooked here would be stale air. We could hear the technicians prepare to move on, having plundered the room of its few minutes of voyeurism. Standing in this place of disadvantage with this man who exuded well-being, I felt at last as if the disparate lives I had been moving among recently were coming together. Public rectitude was meeting private accusation. It was as if Dave Lyons were being introduced to Dan Scoular. But would they talk?

‘How did you find me here?’ he said.

‘Through the BBC.’

‘Nemesis, right enough,’ he said. ‘A Detective-Inspector calls. You’re persistent.’

‘I’ve had to be.’

‘I’ve been expecting you,’ he said. ‘But not in a house in Drumchapel.’

‘I suppose Dave Lyons would phone you.’

‘That’s right.’

The honesty of the admission was hopeful.

‘So you know what I want to talk about.’

‘I do. And we’ll do that. But not here. And not now.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s a long story. And I’m under the cosh to get this programme finished. I’ve another interview to do today. And we’ve got editing time tonight. Tomorrow I’m working as well.’

The hope I had felt receded. He must have seen it in my face. He wrote something on the back of one of the pages of notes he had in his hand. He tore it off and gave it to me.

‘That’s my address,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow. Late afternoon or early evening you can get me there. Bev, my wife’s having a dinner party. But I can talk to you before it.’

I thought about arguing but I had no choice.

‘You wouldn’t be going to synchronise stories, would you?’ I said.

The look he gave me was hard with pride.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I belong to me. When my mouth opens, it’s my words coming out. Nobody works me from the back.’

‘Mr Preston,’ I said. ‘I hope that’s true. I’ve been a long way round the houses here. And I’m getting tired of it. Somebody better speak to me straight. I hope it’s you.’

‘Well, you’ll find out tomorrow, won’t you? I’d better get out.’

He spoke briefly and kindly to Julian and Marlene, who were nervously elated with the experience of having been on television and seemed to be looking for somewhere to put their energy. He ruffled their daughter’s sparse hair. When I came outside with him, the camera was already set up in the middle of the road. He took up his position on the pavement. I walked to the car. I unlocked the door but stood and waited. Somebody checked that no vehicles were approaching and he began to speak to the camera.

‘Any social contract is a two-way agreement,’ he said. ‘It’s one thing to make the people serve the economy. But the economy must also serve the people. If we disadvantage the present of one section of society, we disadvantage the future of all society. The children of the well-off will not just inherit the wealth of their parents. They will also inherit the poverty of the parents of others. Even self-interest, if it is wise, will concern itself with the welfare of all. Not just the poor will inherit the bad places. All of us will.’

He had delivered the words strongly and clearly but at that point one of three boys who had been standing on the pavement opposite shouted, ‘Ye’re aff yer heid’. Apparently, the sight of a man talking precisely to no one in particular had been too much for the boy. They were obviously going to have to take the shot again. I got in the car and drove off. Michael Preston was an articulate man, I was thinking. I hoped he didn’t lose his articulacy overnight.