Strange Loyalties

4

Graithnock isn’t far from Glasgow, just over twenty miles. But it took me about fifty minutes. I wasn’t breaking any speed records. The nearer I came to the place, the less confidence I had in what I was doing.

I had to think that Anna wouldn’t be delighted to see me. I had phoned her a couple of times soon after the funeral and had been talking to a freezer. Each answer had come back small and cold as an ice-cube. She had had no questions of her own. The third time I phoned there was no answer and no answer any time since. I hadn’t much idea what was going on with her. I felt as if I was driving into a fog bank. That slows you down.

I tried to establish landmarks. It wasn’t easy. If I hadn’t known Scott so well by the time he died, what chance did I have to know Anna? The closest I had come to Scott lately had been a couple of months ago. He had phoned and then appeared at the flat. He was at that stage of drunkenness where you are being amazingly sober. His mouth was carving its words like a stone-mason. I was rather condescendingly solicitous for an hour until I began to get drunk as well. We finished what I had in the house.

We had some night. We went out and started hitting pubs as if they were beachheads. It became a competition to see who could talk the most crap in the shortest possible time. We were pretty evenly matched. Like a lot of benders, it was mainly about hilarious pain, using the alchemy of alcohol to convert grief into farce.

We succeeded rather well in different styles. Scott became ludicrously charming. I didn’t. He kept addressing strangers with great formality, calling them ‘dear sir’ and ‘my good, good man’. Ordering a drink was ceremonious enough to have been accompanied by heraldic trumpets. He placed coins on the counter in the manner of an antiquarian displaying rare objects. He proposed elopement to four different women in four different bars. But if he was Sir Galahad of the Bevvy, I was Mordred. My mood became dressed in black. Anyone addressing a remark to me would find me staring into its innocence and seeing bad meanings there. I was so obnoxious I could hardly bear to sit beside myself.

There is a blessedly hazy memory of one of the last pubs we went into. It was Reid’s of Pertyck, I think — at any rate, a bar with a kind of raised balcony section with tables and chairs. I was at the bar. I must have been ordering. Scott was sitting at a table on the balcony part. Perhaps the setting confused him, transported him to another time and place. For he started to order drinks from where he was sitting in a manner that cocked a few quizzical heads. Some Glasgow pubs don’t go in for the grandiose.

‘My round, I believe,’ Scott was shouting. ‘Another bowl of mead, mine host. Minion.’ Fortunately, he was referring to me. ‘The reckoning.’

He threw a crumpled fiver towards the bar. A small man picked it up and held it in his closed hand. I wasn’t noticing much by then. But I noticed that. Mordred had a kind of malicious tunnel vision by this time. Only the bad things got through. I held out my hand, palm up. The small man looked at me questioningly. I tapped my right palm with my left forefinger, no mean achievement given my condition.

‘That,’ I said and closed my hand into a fist. ‘Or that.’

The small man handed over the fiver but he didn’t like doing it.

‘It was a joke,’ he said.

‘That was a joke,’ I said. ‘Well, you’re about as funny as Arthur Askey.’

I paid and brought the drinks back to our table, not mead but gin and tonic for Scott and for me a Bloody Mary, which was a logical expression of my mood, since I never drink it. I gave Scott his fiver back.

‘No, no,’ he was saying. ‘Give it to the people. Let the people drink.’

‘Behave yourself,’ I said.

The small man was back.

‘Hey, you. That was a joke,’ he said.

‘What are you?’ I said. ‘A bloody budgie? That all they taught you to say? Come back in a month when you’ve learned another sentence.’

‘Listen, you,’ the small man said and grabbed my arm.

I shook him off and he sat down on the floor. Things could have turned, as they say, ugly, except that I helped him up.

‘It was a joke,’ he said again.

‘So was that,’ I said. ‘Let’s forget it.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Just so long as ye know it was a joke.’

The repetition of that statement reanimated the demon.

‘Sorry Ah knocked you off your perch,’ I said.

Thankfully, the small man didn’t turn back. But there followed many mutterings while Scott beamed upon the sotto voce threats as if they were a concert in his honour. Miraculously, we got out of there without any more trouble and out of the next bar as well and eventually bought a carry-out and took a taxi back to the flat.

The evening resolved itself into what it had really been about. We were matching disasters. I think Scott had come to see me for some kind of joint exorcism, a mutual laying to rest of some of the wilder dreams we had spawned together lying in our shared bedroom in our parents’ house. He had started to admit to himself how badly his marriage was failing and he needed to share the admission with me, the keeper of his old dreams, as he was the keeper of mine. Also, he knew my situation and I think he suspected it might soon be his and he was perhaps checking out the terrain with someone who already lived there.

I wished now that I had been more help. We were both too sore at that time. As we drank and talked into the night, we discovered a new kind of sibling rivalry. You think you’ve got wounds? Look at mine. Your compass is broken? My ambition’s got gangrene. Women came in for much meandering analysis. Weighty pronouncements on the nature of relationships were made and forgotten. Past girls who had long since vanished into unknown marriages and for all we knew divorces were conjured from their names and seen in the maudlin glow of nostalgia and knelt before, like shrines we never should have lost faith in. We battered ourselves against the incomprehensible and the unsayable and lay back exhausted.

At about half past three in the morning, Scott sat up suddenly on the floor where he’d been lying. He stared ahead like a visionary.

‘I came here to tell you something,’ he said. ‘I should have told you this before.’

He looked at me and looked away. Whatever he had to say was not something he found easy to say.

‘I am leaving Anna,’ he intoned and lay back down and went to sleep.

Next morning he sheepishly washed himself and shaved with my razor and went back to her. I had seen him a few times since then but only over the shoulder of other people’s events.

That was my last real memory of him alive and it wasn’t such a bad one. Let those who think life is measurable by its propriety wish for nicer last remembrances of the ones they love. That crazy night stayed with me. It made me smile. For in spite of all the hurt, he had somehow stayed above it. The size of the pain was the size of the dream he felt denied in him. To hold the pain yet was yet to hold the dream. That was one reason why I couldn’t forgive his dying. That was one reason why I was driving towards Anna.

Who was Anna? I had never quite worked that out. I knew what she looked like all right. She was small and fine-boned and sweet-faced. Since her marriage to Scott, she and I had always exchanged pleasantries like sealed envelopes. Who knew what implications were inside them? Perhaps I would find out now.

On my left I saw Fenwick, where Brian Harkness had lived with his father before marrying Morag. I had met the old man several times. I liked him. I was tempted to go in and see him, postpone my descent into whatever Graithnock had in store for me. Brian’s father and I had things in common. He wasn’t sure of policemen either. But Graithnock was only minutes away — too late to hide.

I went round the one-way system until I saw a phone-box. Then I had to find a parking place. I had decided that, before I spoke to Anna, I would get in touch with John Strachan. He had told me at the funeral that he had been with Scott before he died. I think I was taking out insurance against the possibility of Anna’s monosyllabic responses. If she didn’t want to tell me anything, I could defy her silence and still make my journey worthwhile. I phoned Scott’s school.

‘Good afternoon. Glebe Academy.’

There was a typewriter in the background and a voice saying something I couldn’t hear — those delicious sounds of normalcy that are sweets in the shop-window to an obsessive and he’s a boy again, only able to stare in, without the currency to purchase.

‘Glebe Academy. Yes?’

‘Good afternoon. Could I speak to Mr Strachan, please?’

‘Who’s calling, please?’

‘My name’s Laidlaw. Jack Laidlaw. I’m Scott’s brother.’

I had nearly said, ‘I was Scott’s brother.’ Grief is often so mannerly that it ties itself in knots. I heard a silence I didn’t understand at the other end.

‘Oh, Mr Laidlaw.’ Then she said something that stuck to my chest like a badge. ‘You had one terrific brother, Mr Laidlaw. A lot of us miss him. Pupils and staff alike.’

I loved not just the statement. I loved the breathlessness of her voice, the spontaneity with which she said it, the breaking through the barrier of her own embarrassment. It wasn’t something she had said by rote.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘I’ll get Mr Strachan for you.’

When he came, I didn’t recognise the voice and I realised I might not know him if I saw him.

‘Hullo. Mr Laidlaw?’

‘Mr Strachan. I’m sorry to disturb your day. I know you must be busy. But I’m in Graithnock today. And I just wondered. Would it be possible to talk to you? About Scott. I just would like to understand it better. I’m sorry to impose on you. But could I see you sometime? Even just for half-an-hour?’

He hardly paused.

‘You could come to the house tonight,’ he said.

‘You sure?’

‘I’m sure. You’ll still be around later on?’

‘Definitely.’

‘Okay. I’m sorry I haven’t time to warn Mhairi. Or you could eat with us. But you could come after that. If that’s all right.’

‘That’s great.’

He gave me the address. I was relieved. That meant I was bound to recognise him.

‘Say about seven o’clock. Let’s hope we’ve got the kids down by about then.’

‘That’s great. I’ll see you then. I appreciate this.’

‘It’s no problem. Scott’s worth talking about.’

His words and those of the secretary were ointment on my mind. Two people agreed with the feeling in me. I felt as if I was a member of a cadre against the indifference to Scott’s death. I was ready to talk to Anna now, invested with more authority than my own mania. I went back to the car.