Strange Loyalties

35

Davy, the disillusioned architect I had met up with again a few years ago, had a theory about houses. It is true that he expounded the theory to me when we were both drunk. It is also true that we had just finished holding a kind of conversational memorial service for Jim, our mutual friend who had been killed at nineteen when his motorbike went under a lorry. We had been remembering the preposterous hopes of that year when we were all fifteen and wandering the fields of Ayrshire with the combined imaginative vision of three Columbuses staring out at the Atlantic. Therefore, Davy’s theory may have been less coherent and perhaps more dark than he had wanted it to be. It expressed the immediacy of a sad mood as well as the general unease of a troubled life. But I think he meant it all right and I think the sober man would have ratified the findings of the drunk one.

‘Theatre,’ Davy had said, his forefinger tracing out an immediately vanishing pattern in the spillage on the table in the bar. The noise around him drowned his voice the way the liquid defied any shape he tried to give it. But he had found something he meant and he had to say it.

‘Theatre,’ Davy said. ‘That’s what houses are, you know. Just theatre. All buildings are. Charades of permanence. They’re fantasies. Fictions we make about ourselves. Right?’

With the prescience of the drunk, I was nodding in agreement before I knew what it was he meant.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘What do the pyramids mean, for example? They’re a lie, that’s what they are. Okay? What are they supposed to mean? The immortality of the Pharaohs. Right? Are the Pharaohs immortal? Are they hell. The Pharaohs is long gone, don’t worry about it. Empty bandages and some pots of entrails. That’s the Pharaohs. So what do the pyramids really mean? Mortality. The corpses of all the people it took to build them. The pyramids are a lie. They mean the opposite of what they say.’

He sipped a little more whisky, sending it in pursuit of his thoughts.

‘Well, most houses are lies, anyway. If we just built them as shelters, that would be fair enough. If we say, look, we’re a pretty feeble species and it’s cold out there and we need all the help we can get to survive, that makes sense. Let’s make wee shelters and hide in them. That’s honest. A tent’s honest. But as soon as we go past function, we’re at it. Big houses aren’t an expression of ourselves. They’re a denial of ourselves. We’re not saying, see how feeble we are, but look at how important we are. Right? We’re saying we could be here forever. We’re a permanent fixture. Houses are one of the main ways that we tell lies about ourselves. They’re public statements of security and stability and achievement that deny the private truth. They’re masks. They’re where we play out roles that aren’t us. Just theatre. Look at houses carefully.’

I was trying to take his advice. This house in Bearsden, in Davy’s guide to house-watching, was presumably enacting a domestic comedy. It sat in soft sunshine. The well kept grass looked too green to be true. The French windows were open. Children kept spilling through them into the garden and being shepherded by adults back into the house where the party was taking place. From this distance, the performance was in mime.

The audience consisted of four men sitting in a car parked on the hill above the house, looking down on it. We were a mixed audience, as all audiences are, each bringing his own experience, his own preoccupations, his own interpretation to what we were watching. Edek, the mechanical man, was just there for the acoustics. He was an extension of his machinery, not so much concerned about what would happen as concerned that it should happen clearly. Brian Harkness was being a bit blasé as if he just wanted the performance over without any mistakes being made. Eddie Foley, I imagined, had to be the most fraught of us. He would take the drama for real because it was real for him, a possibly life-changing moment where he was both watcher and participant.

Myself, I suppose I was looking for a highly personal denouement to the first part of a double bill. I had another play to go to. I was aware of Michael Preston waiting to say his piece and I was hoping he hadn’t learned his lines from Dave Lyons. The scene, as they say, would be an apartment in Glasgow. There would be played out the coda to my week.

But what would happen there was related to what happened here. They were interconnected, the legal hypocrisies reflecting the illegal ones in endlessly duplicating mirrors until they made a warren. I was hoping not just to incriminate Matt Mason but to move nearer to understanding where I had been this week, where I had been for a long time. As I looked at Matt Mason’s house, I thought of Scott’s house and Dave Lyons’ house. I thought of our house in Simshill, where Ena and I had for years enacted a marriage that was a concealment of mutual loneliness.

Eddie Foley coughed. Nobody said anything. We were waiting for the entrance that would transform the scene for us. From our high position, we could see the taxi come along the street beneath us. As it stopped at the opening to the driveway at the front of the house, a small girl came running out of the French windows at the back, followed by Matt Mason. He was wearing slacks and a polo-neck sweater.

The small girl seemed to be upset about something. As Matt Mason caught up with her, she stopped. Melanie McHarg stepped out of the taxi. Matt Mason put his hand on the girl’s shoulder and crouched down to talk to her. Melanie McHarg was paying the driver through his window, which is not a Glasgow idiom, since payment is usually made inside. I thought maybe she didn’t use a lot of taxis. Matt Mason straightened up and took the girl’s hand, apparently distracting her by showing her the garden. The taxi moved off. Melanie McHarg adjusted her blue lightweight coat over her wide-skirted floral dress and went out of sight towards the house.

Matt Mason looked like any dutiful husband spending a weekend in the garden with his family. From this far, he seemed an identikit of suburban man. But my knowledge of him provided me with some harsh close-ups. I was aware that the hand gently holding that of the small girl was aggressive with expensive rings, wore wealth like a socially accepted knuckle-duster. I saw the thinning hair, the hard face, the grey irises flecked with ice that could put a frost on anything they looked at. I saw him where he was, not where he seemed to be.

Margaret, his wife, stood at the French windows and said something to him. He let go of the girl’s hand. His wife came out into the garden. They talked briefly. He stared at the ground. He went into the house. Margaret took the girl’s hand and followed him in.

‘Hello, hello,’ Brian Harkness said in a whisper.

Even from this distance, Margaret Mason walked like a carnival of womanhood.

‘Bloody activate,’ Edek said. ‘Bloody activate.’

He rolled down his rear-seat window and balanced his leather-cased receiver on the sill. He pulled out the aerial. He checked the connection to the tape-recorder on the seat, which he had insisted on telling us was a Nagra. (‘State of the bloody art, don’t worry about it.’)

‘Is this going to work, Edek?’ I said.

‘Is up to her now, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘There’s no more I can do from here. She’s got a mike in her brassiere. Connected up to a first-class transmitter. Taped to the outside of her thigh. That was hard work. Jeez, the things you have to do for your art. I even picked her wardrobe. Now it’s in the lap of the gods. Or the breast of the goddess, maybe.’

He was doing mysterious things with some of the knobs on his machine.

‘I hope she hasn’t interfered with the bloody wiring,’ he said.

The garden was empty. The building looked charming and beautiful, a picture in an estate agent’s window. Then there was a sudden crackling and the house was haunted by a dark voice.

‘In here. Your timing could’ve been better.’

Rendered metallic by the recording equipment, Matt Mason’s voice was low and harsh. Abstracted from gesture or facial expression or social context, it emerged without concealment, just itself. It cut into the silence of the car like a serrated knife.

‘So, Melanie. To what do we owe the pleasure?’

There was a pause. Melanie’s voice, when it came, seemed barely there. It impressed itself on the surface of the silence as delicately as fingerprints, seeming almost to fade as it happened. It made you listen intently.

‘Matt, I’m sorry to be bothering you.’

‘So why are you?’

‘Matt, you know what’s happened.’

‘Do I? What’s that?’

‘Meece is dead.’

‘Uh-huh? Siddown, Melanie.’

The material of her dress rustled through the microphone as she sat. The length of the silence made me wonder if we had lost them. I looked round at Edek. From his position at the open window, he winked.

‘So that’s the news, is it?’ Matt Mason said. ‘You came to tell me that?’

‘I was livin’ with Meece.’

‘I know that. Come on, Melanie. Do you think Ah just arrived on the bus yesterday?’

‘I miss him, Matt. I miss him so much.’

‘What is it you miss? Your supplier? Is it money you want, Melanie?’

‘No. No. I’m tryin’ to come off it.’

‘Is that right?’

‘What happened, Matt? I can’t understand it.’

‘You don’t have to. Let other people do that. Now if you need money, Ah’ll give ye some money. If you don’t, that’s up to you. Either way, you’ll have to leave. We’re havin’ a party here. You’re not exactly addin’ to the atmosphere.’

I was hoping I hadn’t underprepared. I had simply suggested that Melanie should go to Matt Mason and ask about Meece Rooney, and possibly Dan Scoular. I had chosen not to rehearse her because I was afraid she would give herself away if she tried to follow a script. She wasn’t exactly in shape for handling complicated instructions. Now I wasn’t sure she could improvise a response to such a summary dismissal. I leaned into her silence.

‘I can’t leave, Matt,’ she said.

‘Sorry?’

‘I can’t.’

‘Ah don’t think you heard me. You are leaving.’

‘No, Matt. No.’

‘Come on! Get — ’

The tape-recorder fed us a confusion of noise — rasping sounds, what could have been a chair falling, strange poppings.

‘For Nagra read aggro,’ Edek said.

‘To hell with this,’ Brian said.

He put his hand on the ignition. I gripped his wrist. Brian stared at me.

‘He’s givin’ her a doin’,’ he said.

‘Behave,’ I said quietly. ‘This is a war. It’s not a skirmish. We’d do Melanie a lotta favours breakin’ cover now. The cell door’s open. Sh. Let’s see if he walks in.’

We waited. I could hear Eddie Foley breathing directly behind me. The first clear sound that came back to us was of Melanie crying. Brian’s look judged me hard.

‘Come on, Melanie,’ I said. ‘If just one person turns up and defies their fear, we’ve got a chance.’

I was watching the house. Three children, two girls and a boy, had come out into the garden. They were playing what looked like an improvised game of tig, a way of touching one another, of learning one another without admitting that’s what they were doing. Receding and approaching, running away and hoping to be caught, they were a beautiful innocence, human relationships at play. Behind them, the house seemed to me menacing, an adult corruption that was already threatening to thwart their lives. They did not know the inheritance the house was giving them, what lay at its heart, the continuing conflict between violence and hurt.

I stared at the sunny garden, the red tiled roof, the white walls, the shining windows. This was where we were, all right — a place where violence dressed nice, injustice wore legal robes, venom smiled sweetly, unnecessary suffering was ignored and hypocrisy was honoured. I thought of many of the people I had met this week. They lived here, too. And like polite house-guests, they wouldn’t break the rules. Their continued residency depended on that conformity. To break the rules was to put yourself at hazard.

I realised that nobody I had met had been quite prepared to do that. They might have whispered the odd secret to me but they wouldn’t stand up and risk themselves to challenge the lies of others. If we were to expose the truth of Matt Mason’s life, Melanie was our last chance.

It was a strange thought. Here was a woman who had more reason than any of us for running and hiding. Life had battered her remorselessly. She had been used by men. She had been on drugs. She was hanging on to what remained of her sense of herself by her fingernails. Who could blame her if she had decided her only allegiance was to herself? It would take a lot of courage to do otherwise.

We were still waiting. When Matt Mason spoke, I understood that his long silence had been to give her time to compose herself.

‘Okay? You ready now?’

There was another silence.

‘No.’

I could have cheered. That one word was defencelessness refusing to be intimidated.

‘Get up and get out of here.’

‘No. I need to understand what happened to Meece. I feel as if my life’s over.’

‘Not yet it’s not. But that can be arranged.’

On the wildness of that remark I heard the conversation swing in the direction we needed it to go. The weird experience of a helpless woman defying him had made Matt Mason careless. This didn’t happen and, since it didn’t happen, his reactions lost their judgment.

‘I need to know about Meece,’ Melanie said.

‘You know about Meece. Everybody knew about Meece. He was a piece of shit. You know what he was up to. You were in it with him. Ye’re lucky ye didn’t join him. Thank me for that.’

Brian looked at me and raised his eyebrows. Eddie Foley sighed behind me. The children were still playing in the garden.

‘Meece? I’ll tell you about Meece. What were ye doin’ with him, anyway? You used to have a bit of class. Remember Dan Scoular? The love of your life? That was a man at least. Remember what I did for you? I brought you to my house. Ah let ye meet real people. Look at ye now. Listen. You want to mourn for somebody, mourn for Dan Scoular. He’s dead, too.’

I assumed that Melanie’s distraught state would conceal the fact that the information came as no surprise.

‘You know who killed him? Meece. The demon driver. That’s right. It’s not him you should mourn for. He took out as real a man as I’ve met. Just for the money. Only the wages weren’t enough, were they? He’s got to give himself a regular bonus. He thinks he’s too important now. He’s got a hold on us. A special case. He was a special case, all right. So I put him in one. Wooden.’

The only sound for a time was Melanie crying. The shock of what Matt Mason had told her must have been severe. He wasn’t finished.

‘So now you know.’

A matronly woman appeared at the French windows, drinking a cup of tea and watching the children.

‘You’re lucky to be alive. Ever say anything about this and you won’t be.’

The conjunction of the homeliness of what we were seeing and the savagery of what we were hearing was hard to bear. I heard Eddie Foley gasp faintly and I realised that the woman was Millie, his wife. It was as if she were standing unaware in the crossfire of contradictions that were his life.

‘Who would believe you, anyway? Hophead. Get out.’

There were sounds of movement, of breathing. The stillness in the car was total. We saw Melanie appear at the end of the driveway. She was walking blind. The machine went dead. I looked round at Edek. He made a wiping gesture with his hand. He had decided her tears were private. I was glad she had remembered to turn left out of the driveway. Bob Lilley would be waiting for her round the corner. She went out of sight. The children were still playing in the garden.

‘Nice man,’ Edek said.

‘I think it’s a good idea for Melanie to leave the country,’ Brian said. ‘Mason might get nervous about what he’s said.’

‘He won’t have time to,’ I said.

I turned round to look at Eddie Foley. He was pale.

‘A woman as brave as that deserves to be protected,’ I said. ‘Some woman, eh?’

Eddie Foley stared at me. He nodded infinitesimally. I took it as thunderous applause.

‘What, we going in for him now?’ Brian said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘We keep to the arrangement. We go to the Getaway.’

Brian drove. Once we were well into the city again, Eddie touched me lightly on the shoulder.

‘Pull in anywhere here, Brian,’ I said. ‘We’ll let Eddie off.’

I got out of the car with Eddie and we walked a few yards away. We stopped. I waited.

‘So what is it you want from me?’ Eddie said.

‘You know what I want, Eddie. Matt Mason’s just put himself in the nick. You heard him do it. There’s nothing you can do for him. But you saw Millie. She was enjoying the view. Though her view is a bit restricted. You don’t want to open her eyes too wide, do you? You can maybe still convince her you were a dupe.’

‘What price?’

‘Somebody else has to go inside with Matt Mason. We know Meece Rooney killed Dan Scoular. Who killed Meece Rooney?’

‘There were two of them,’ he said.

He looked along the street. He was taking his farewell of what he had been.

‘Tommy Brogan and Chuck Walker.’

Both were known. He looked into my face. I nodded. He turned away. He became just a part of the busy street.