The Illuminations

LOVE ME DO

In the waiting room, Alice looked at the frosted glass and wondered why receptionists are always so impatient and puffed up. Always, she thought. Did they want to be doctors themselves, and that’s why they hate giving out forms and taking calls about appointments? It made sense. You don’t want to spend your life feeling secondary to the person upstairs. It pleased Alice to allow a thought like that to flourish silently in a boring room, as if she had now become, at this point in her life, a lesson to herself, the kind of person on whom no small thing is wasted.

‘I’m not sure,’ Dr Sabin said. ‘It’s complicated.’ He had taken to wearing tweed jackets and knitted ties. He offered Alice a mint from a little vintage tin showing a smiling kid and a Union Jack. ‘The truth is we’re all getting older and your mother is eighty-two.’

‘It’s the hallucinations, as I call them,’ Alice said. ‘It comes and goes all the time. Some days she’s quite normal. But yesterday she was talking as if it was the 1960s. Just talking about the bands and the short skirts, you know. Not recalling it but blethering to me, and to Maureen, her neighbour, as if it was all happening now. I mean, that’s quite hard to take when the person was always so — well, intelligent, I’d call it. My mother has always behaved as if the truth was the biggest thing. The photographs she took when she was young were all about that.’

‘Was that her skill, taking photographs?’

Alice looked at the window and sighed. People’s offices always said so much about them, the old, soothing prints, the sweets, the boxes of wine glasses sitting on the filing cabinet. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘It’s a sad story, really. Sad, I’d call it. She was a name. A bit of a name. Anne Quirk. Her photographs still turn up in a few collections.’

‘Really?’

She looked at him. She waited. ‘Anyway, she gave it up. Then she started going to Blackpool just before I was born and she met the man who must be my father.’

‘You didn’t know him?’

‘I saw him a few times. His name was Harry. She met him at a night school or something. A young woman who’d lost her goal. And suddenly there was this Harry and he was a photography lecturer in Manchester. He was in with that group of young photographers who were out on the streets and in the factories, you know, recording it all, and it gave her another chance. She was the only woman — I mean, among the photographers.’

‘They didn’t get married?’

Dr Sabin found it interesting to talk to somebody who didn’t have angina or a common complaint. People tend to forget you’re human when you’re a doctor and what he liked most was conversation. So the appointment with Alice ran on, the doctor wishing to expand his knowledge of this strange family who had travelled the world, who had talent, stories. The old mother was even quite famous, she was saying.

‘No, they were never married. She got pregnant. She’s got some information about Harry written down. I think he wrote it.’ Alice shook her head and the silence that came said enough.

‘We can move on if you like.’

‘It’s hard to talk about. It’s hard to know what’s true. Harry was a war hero. Harry flew the spy planes. But I’ve never seen any of the medals she talks about.’

‘They’re a bit overrated, those things,’ he said. She chose to ignore the doctor’s easy familiarity with all the world’s predicaments and situations. He was a bit like that. She came quite regularly to see him and always left feeling better, but it annoyed her the way he found every problem so familiar. It was clearly a part of his effort at cheerfulness and she found herself hoping he was a secret drinker.

‘Other people’s great deeds,’ Dr Sabin said. ‘They’re sometimes a bit hard to take. I know I find that.’

‘I was never able to ask.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Because, you know, the truth is so obvious to some people that they don’t feel the need to share it. In fact, they resent being asked about it. They just want everyone to behave as if their story is the only story. And the people who ask questions in that situation are treated like traitors. It’s a form of control and a kind of bullying.’

‘You describe it very well.’

‘I’ve had it all my life.’

He told her to take her time. Sometimes Alice would just shudder at the memory of things. ‘Okay?’ he asked.

‘She always left me with other people. I was really brought up by the neighbours.’

‘Is that right?’

‘Yes. It’s a thing in Glasgow. Somebody should write a book about the role of the next-door neighbour. She’s got the same thing again with some woman who lives next door to her now. Maureen, she’s called. We don’t really know anything about her,

though she’s learning a lot about us, I’m sure. Same old story: the neighbour’s in charge.’

‘And you can’t speak to your mother about the past?’

‘Too late, doctor. Too late. For years I tried to please her and be more like her. She thinks I’m boring, I’m conventional, and I am those things, to people like her. Married to the wrong person. Too interested in the wrong things. You know. But the fact is, my existence threatens her story. I used to think she might love me more by realising I was all she had left of Harry. But that’s not true, Dr Sabin. My father has never gone because the great story of him only grows and grows.’

‘You feel you’ve been overshadowed?’

‘You can say that again.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh, yes. I’ve been sacrificed.’

‘You might be wrong.’

‘Maybe. I used to think it would be possible, one day, to get back to a kind of reality — you know, about her own achievements, her photographs, everything she did. But it wasn’t possible. She just transferred her worship of Harry onto my son, Luke. She always wanted a son. He’s always been close to her and now he’s coming back.’

‘He’s been in Afghanistan?’

‘He discharged himself. Or something like that. And now she’s so far gone it’s like all her fantasies coming home to roost. None of the lies were shot down or set to rights, and I didn’t get to talk. I didn’t get to ask about my father or get a grip on the past.’

‘Their past.’

‘It’s my past, too,’ she said.

‘I see.’

‘I will never be able to ask her.’

‘And that’s important to you?’

‘It was. But it’s too late.’

‘Her life’s not over,’ Dr Sabin said. ‘And yours is very far from being over, Alice. We’ll keep talking.’ He stood up and walked to the window and stood looking out at the sea. ‘We have a lot of it now, with the ageing population,’ he said. ‘And dementia presents insidiously, so that patients, carers, family — doctors, too — we all find ourselves only slowly understanding it. But it’s true that dementia can dramatise some of the issues the patient might have had with memory and so on.’

Alice stood up. ‘Dramatise. Yes. With memory. It’s as if my mother turned to something else when she gave up her photographs.’

‘Something else?’

‘Make-believe,’ Alice said. ‘Fantasy. Like all her hopes went sour and she just couldn’t take reality any more.’

‘Perhaps,’ he said.

‘I’ve always been made to feel I lack faith.’

‘I agree there’s drama in it while it’s happening,’ Dr Sabin said, ‘but I can tell you from experience, Alice, that life reveals itself, in any case. I see it every day in this room. Time shows everything.’

She lifted her coat off the back of the chair. ‘I didn’t ever think it would be so hard. So hard to face it.’ She could feel her eyes well up and her breath staggered from one sentence to the next. ‘I would love to spend half an hour with the woman who made those pictures.’

‘She hasn’t gone,’ he whispered. ‘Quite the opposite. She’s coming back. And maybe you could prepare to meet her halfway. Between the person she is now and the person she used to

be. Enter into the spirit of where her mind is going and allow her …’

‘She’s never needed my permission for anything.’

‘Well, maybe she does now.’ They sat in a state of hesitation for a few seconds and the seconds seemed long. ‘There’s been too much denial in this family,’ Alice said.

‘Maybe so. Maybe in all families. But your own counselling might mean you can help her by helping yourself. Your mother isn’t your enemy. She isn’t your only resource. She’s losing parts of herself and gaining others. And if it’s possible, Alice, you might take it less personally.’

‘I worry that her lies shaped my life. I worry that I only took up with Sean, my husband Sean, because of her war-hero thing. I was always trying to keep up. My husband was a soldier and I lost him and I used to worry I would lose my son the same way. You don’t see the connections in your life until it’s too late to disentangle them.’

‘So, Luke’s on his way home?’

‘Yes, he is. I think it’s been hard for him. He’s been through a lot out there and I want him to know, when he comes back, that he doesn’t have to talk about it if he doesn’t want to.’

The doctor turned. ‘We all have something to hold back,’ he said. ‘And maybe some of us depend on other people’s mistakes to make us feel better about our own.’

‘So, it’s my fault?’ She produced a ball of tissue from her sleeve and held it against her nose.

‘Not everything reduces itself to the question of fault, Alice. Most things don’t, in fact.’

‘Right.’

‘You’ve coped well.’

‘I don’t think so. Sean and I thought we would live for a hundred years. And when he died it was going to be me and Luke against the world. But Luke chose my mother, just as she chose Harry.’

‘You feel the men got the better deal?’

‘God, yes,’ she said. ‘What were the men really like? God knows. Because they always got top billing. The boys are the heroes in this family.’

‘She didn’t like women?’

‘She loves women. Her friends. The woman next door. The girls she knew when she was young. She just doesn’t particularly like the woman she gave birth to.’

‘Just remember, she’s not well.’

‘I think her mind’s gone. I told you about the rabbit?’

‘Yes, you said.’

‘Caring about a fake rabbit. What’s that about?’

Some smiles aren’t smiles. What he did with his mouth was more like an acknowledgement, a firm admission that some mysteries must be endured and never solved. He sat down and laid a hand on the mousepad and put a finger to his lips. ‘Nobody takes me seriously,’ he said. ‘But the thing I wish I could prescribe isn’t available in the pharmacy.’

‘What’s that?’

‘They don’t keep it in bottles.’

‘What?’

‘Time,’ he said.

She got outside and breathed the sea air, taking her time, moving on very precisely to another self. You have to dust yourself off and get on with it and that’s that, she said. Alice could drop in and out of her own feelings and now she wanted a latte. She

walked down the street to the Marina Cafe thinking of something entirely new, and, once inside, she waited. No one was there and the sweet jars lined the wall, the jukebox playing ‘Love Me Do’ to the mirrors and the clean tables.

BLUE

Maureen said she wanted one of those sky-coloured radios and a light blue rug for the living room. Not exactly the same blue everywhere but very similar and kind of summery. ‘I’ve never been one for dark colours,’ she said. ‘People with black sofas and brown curtains, heaven help us, they want their heads examined. There are such nice things in the shops and our Ian’s handy with a screwdriver, so if you go to IKEA you can just get him round and he’ll hammer it together, because you don’t want those men coming, you know, the ones with the van. They make you smile. They charge you a fortune and leave a right mess in your hall.’

Maureen always said she had too much time to think.

‘I love them to death, but …’

Maybe her children had betrayed her by seeking happiness elsewhere. She’d think it mad if anyone said it, but her children saw how affronted she could be by their ambitions and their progress. ‘Nobody is prouder of their children’s success than I am,’ she’d whisper. And she did enjoy their achievements in a boast-to-the-neighbours kind of way. But she didn’t like what comes with success in one’s children: the independence, the sudden confidence, the distance, the self-sufficiency. That was all bad news from her point of view. More than bad news: it was selfish. They should be holding themselves responsible for the way she felt, as if only

their guilt could assuage her. And, because of this, it was impossible for her ever to let them see that she was happy. Maureen was a woman who kept her good times a secret from her children for fear they might stop pitying her.

The great secret was she liked her life. The routines at Lochranza Court suited her down to the ground and she loved her friends. But that didn’t stop her from leaving messages on the voicemails of her children, messages that ended with a few tears. She would sniff into the phone and slowly her bad feelings would become an aria of blame about them not doing enough. In all their adult lives — and Ian hadn’t been a teenager for twenty-five years — Maureen had never sat her children down together at a table for a meal. And it wasn’t because she couldn’t cook or couldn’t buy a chicken. It was something else: making a meal would have suggested a level of well-being that some part of her, some sad part of her, couldn’t bear them to witness at the same time. She resented their spouses as if they had cast a spell on her children and made them forget who they were.

She had put out a lovely spread for Alice. Cut sandwiches sat on plates, pieces of Victoria sponge, amid the mugs and spoons at the kitchen table. Good God, thought Alice: sugar in the tea and all this cake and it isn’t even lunch-time. ‘She measures out her life in sugar spoons,’ her mother cracked one time, when she was well. And it was true Alice always worried about her weight.

‘Oh, what the hell. Who cares?’ Maureen said. ‘It’s just us two. If we’re not good to ourselves, who’s going to be?’

Coming along the corridor that day, Alice had enjoyed an unexpected feeling of belonging. Some days she experienced a random turn for the better and it usually didn’t last. She suddenly admired the housing complex and saw it as a wonderful

cooperative. She said to herself she hoped that, when her time came, they would bring her to live in a place like this. With the Yamaha organ and the board games, the large-print books, the knitting patterns, it seemed made for tired wanderers, except that most of the people in there had lived all their lives in the town. She thought she probably deserved a place at Lochranza Court after all her upsets, before realising that was the sort of thing Maureen would say.

Each flat had a ledge by the front door, like a low concrete table, which the resident would crowd with ornaments. Flat 21 had a collection of porcelain dogs with sad eyes, jowly faces and hanging ears. Maureen’s daughter once said it was a black hole of empathy. Flat 20 had a host of fairies hopping about in eternity on gossamer wings. ‘Life is much more interesting if it scarcely exists,’ said their surprised little faces, their slender hands. Alice was heading to Maureen’s place, but passing her mother’s she saw again the photograph on her ledge of a shipyard and a red poppy stuck in the corner of the frame.

‘That photograph,’ Alice said, putting down her teacup, ‘the one outside my mother’s door. It’s one of hers, isn’t it? One of the ones she took years ago?’

‘Yes,’ Maureen said. She was washing the butter knife in the sink. ‘It was one of the pictures from those suitcases she keeps in her bathroom. But she says there’s a lot more of her stuff somewhere.’

‘And why get them out now?’

‘Well, your mum being the way she is, it’s good to get things out and try to remember, you know? The nurse in the Memory Club, she encourages that kind of thing. Get stuff out, she says. Get the old albums out and stir up the memories. So in the evenings your

mum and I have been pulling things out and I’ve been making piles of them. We thought we’d put that one outside the door for people to see.’

The late-night tasks. The letters to Luke. Alice couldn’t be sure she wasn’t envious of Maureen. It’s the sort of thing a daughter should be doing with her mother. And yet she was grateful to the neighbour because she knew that Anne would never have enjoyed doing those things with her. Anne trusted strangers, and so, quite clearly, did Maureen: they liked a new person’s willingness not to jump on the things you said, questioning everything and doubting you. Families did that but strangers didn’t. And so Alice swallowed another insult when she was told about the picture. The photographs were coming out of the suitcases and it was a good thing. And when she thought about it, well, it probably was a good thing if the past could emerge, at last, without her mother’s editing.

‘They’re fantastic pictures,’ Maureen said. ‘And I suppose they show you what Anne was like in her prime, you know, long before this started happening to her.’

‘I couldn’t tell you,’ Alice said. ‘Some people hide away in their prime. You can’t know them.’

‘And you only get to them later?’

‘That’s right. When they need you.’

‘You know I help her with her letters?’ Maureen said.

‘I do, yes,’ said Alice. ‘It’s been very kind. I appreciate it. Especially you helping her keep in touch with my son. We’re an odd family.’

‘I could show you odd. You should see mine. One minute you’re the best mammy in the world and the next minute you could be missing and they wouldn’t notice.’

‘I don’t think this tour’s been easy for Luke,’ Alice said. ‘The Ayrshire boy who died. You know about that? Well, Luke was there. He saw it.’

‘Aye. You and I spoke on the phone, remember? For a terrible moment we all thought …’

‘Yes.’

They sat in silence for a moment. Maureen felt Alice was a bit strange that day, a bit stressed or something, but frankly, it was hard enough trying to keep up with Anne without worrying about her daughter as well. ‘Anyway,’ Maureen said, ‘it’s not only the letters from Luke. Anne’s been getting other letters, too, and there’s one that seems quite important. It’s from Canada.’ Maureen brought it from the cutlery drawer and handed it to Alice. The envelope was marked with crayon and with various stamps and crossings out. The name of the place it came from was across the top of the letter. ‘The Art Gallery of Ontario,’ read Alice. And when her eye dropped to the foot of the page she read out the whole address: ‘317 Dundas Street West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5T 1G4.’

‘That’s the address. It’s a woman, I think,’ Maureen said, twisting her head to get a better view of the letter she’d already looked at many times. Alice went on in silence and pressed her own lips with a finger when she noticed they were moving. The curator who wrote the letter said she was writing about ‘Mrs Quirk’s photographs’, and she used the words ‘honoured’ and ‘intrigued’, ‘visionary’ and ‘important’. It said the gallery was planning an exhibition of lost women photographers and that Anne Quirk was an artist with a connection to Ontario. The word ‘marginalised’ appeared in the third paragraph, and, further down, where Alice noticed a teacup stain, it spoke of ‘permission’. Alice felt a

sudden weight of responsibility reading the letter. She wasn’t at all sure what to think so she folded it away immediately and put the envelope in her bag.

‘Isn’t that something?’ Maureen said.

Alice found it hard to say anything. She simply stood looking at the images on the television, staring at them before realising there was no sound on, then she turned with damp eyes to the centre of the room and tried to regain her composure. In some rooms you don’t notice the contents so much as how carefully they’ve been polished.

CENTRAL STATION

They say oil and water don’t mix. But those people never walked out of Cowcaddens and turned at the corner to face the card shops and their helium balloons, the windows displaying teddies and jokes in all weathers. They never walked down Sauchiehall Street in the pouring rain and felt the oil in the rain that waxes your skin and makes you belong to Glasgow. She turned into Renfield Street and immediately thought of the exhaust fumes from the old buses and the neon signs above Central Station that used to glow in the dark with ads for sugar and whisky.

It was 1981 again. The days of Sean and her with bags of chips after nights at the Apollo. If you meet a man who can make you laugh then stay with him for ever. And that was her Sean: he could make a dark night and a poke of chips something you’d want to remember. She could see the two of them walking down Renfield Street with the neon above and Glasgow standing cold in the exact present, their fingers all salt and vinegar. She could

still feel the warm brown chip-paper inside the

Evening Times

with the print coming off on her hands. They could ignore the news then because it wasn’t about them and she saw Sean balling up the paper and chucking it into a bin, pulling her in for a kiss.

She always got nervous walking in the city centre with Sean, the green, white and orange buses and the whole Rangers and Celtic thing and him a soldier beginning his service in Belfast. It was a sectarian time and you could get into trouble, but those nights out with Sean seemed to glow pleasantly in her mind.

Bell’s Scotch Whisky. ‘Afore ye go.’

‘Afore ye go where?’ Sean said. ‘I mean, they’re saying: “Drink whisky, afore ye go.”’

‘Before ye go out.’

‘But if you drink Bell’s whisky before you go out for the evening you’ll be drunk by the time you get there.’

‘True.’

‘So what does it mean, “Afore ye go”? Drink Bell’s whisky, before you die?’

She remembered laughing. Creasing up. The laughter in your youth that comes before everything.

‘Before ye go to bed? What does it mean, Alice? Before ye go into a meeting? Before you go on holiday? I’m asking you: what does it mean, the advertisement for Bell’s Scotch whisky? Afore ye go? But what is

go

? And what is

afore

?’

‘And what is

ye

?’ she said.

‘Exactly!’ Sean said. ‘What is the ye that must have Bell’s Scotch whisky before he — or, okay, she — goes?’

She remembered it all. She remembered his teeth and his laughter and the scent of Brut. The fact that his eyes seemed glassy when the buses passed. It was the teeth and his smell she liked the

best: nobody could touch Sean for teeth, and they stopped again to kiss outside McDavit’s kilt shop. ‘Shall we have one?’ he said, looking up. ‘It’s your nation. It’s your community. All of you having one before ye go.’

‘Why don’t we?’ she said. ‘Ye need all the help you can get in this life, afore ye go.’ The grin that comes before everything. And then he took her arm and led her over the road to the Horse Shoe Bar for a whisky and a comic sermon on Irish songs. The pub darkened now in her mind as she made her way but there would always be something about that place, always a light on. It seemed so long ago and Glasgow seemed so changed as she fought through the rain to meet their son.

ELECTRIC BRAE

She didn’t see him right away. She passed the bar in the Rogano and walked to the back of the restaurant, and there he was in the last booth over by the kitchen. Back of the bus, back of beyond: that was always Luke when he was wee. And there he was now with one of those tall beers in front of him. White shirt, nice sweater. Her own son deep in the pages of a book. She stood on the carpet and just watched him for a moment. He was typically thin but he looked tired for a young man.

‘Mum,’ he said.

She hadn’t expected to feel his resolve when he hugged her but it was the strength she noticed. She saw his exhaustion but his arms still had certainty and pride in them: it was always that way with soldiers, the bravado, the private fight, the clean shirt, the shoes much brighter than bombs. She closed her eyes and patted

him wordlessly in the middle of his back. She didn’t ponder for long his state of mind because she noticed as she patted him the gauze of rain still clinging to his jumper. ‘Good God, son. You’re damp. Did you come out without a coat?’

‘I’m only five minutes away.’

‘But it’s cashmere,’ she said.

‘Mum …’

‘Right you are.’

She wouldn’t be the mother. You can’t, really. After the battles and the helicopters you can’t come storming in with advice about raincoats. There was something different about Luke as he sat across from her. Not determined, but achieved. Some people would have counted it a loss in him because it seemed that the softness had gone. Looking at him, listening to his low murmur as he spoke about the flat and the joy of sleeping in his own bed, she felt she was looking at Sean.

‘You look good,’ she said. But she wasn’t sure. His life was telling on him. He didn’t know he was young and he probably never would: any day now he’d be thirty, then thirty-five, then you’re in your forties with that tremendous sense of no turning back and nothing really proved. It would take a nice woman to renew his spirit and get him on the right track. That’s what she thought, conjuring with the next set of problems before the present ones had settled.

‘This and that,’ he said, answering her question. ‘I’ve been walking a lot. I went up north. Climbed a bit. And I went down south to see about things.’ She ordered the Pinot Grigio. She thought it overpriced but it was the nicest they had by the glass. She saw he was more anxious now and shorter of breath and she tried to shelve the feeling that he was more available now, as

victims are. He wasn’t a victim, he was somebody who needed time, she thought, the thing they couldn’t prescribe at the chemist. The waiter came with two small cups of Cullen Skink.

‘Gordon will tell you all about it when he comes,’ she said. ‘He’s making gallons of it now for his company. You know about his company, don’t you — Homeland Fisheries?’

‘He’s selling fish soup?’

‘Well, you know. Prepared fish products. Ready to cook. Instructions in the pack. Fishcakes. Mussels. He won an award for best home delivery company.’

‘Good old Gordon,’ Luke said.

‘He’s all right,’ Alice said. She paid her dues to Luke’s mocking tone. ‘He works hard.’

‘It’s a busy life,’ said Luke. ‘Smoked haddock.’

She giggled, took a sip. He noted a certain fierceness about her, the pursed lips, the eyes. He could tell she wanted to get close to him by having an argument. Families do that. But he’d been away a while and wasn’t sure he could face it.

‘Aren’t you proud?’ she asked.

‘Of what?’

‘Scotland.’

‘I know we’re supposed to feel proud. But maybe we ought to earn that feeling.’

‘You

have

earned it.’

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘Everybody feels proud, Luke.’ She drank nervously from her glass and put her elbows on the table.

‘Before we get totally leathered on national pride,’ he said, ‘maybe we should first work out how to be proud of being in the human race. I would like that. I would like that first.’

‘You were fighting for your country.’

‘I was fighting for Flannigan and Dooley. For Lennox and Scullion. Is that a nation?’

‘Your friends? It kind of is, Luke.’

‘There’s no nation, Mum. There’s only people surfing the Net. People like your husband sending cod in parsley sauce to people in France. And the money pouring into your life via PayPal. And every person imagining the world as he wants to see it, just like the guy in the turban behind the wall with an explosive vest who thinks he’s going to Allah. He thinks he loves his country, too. And he thinks his country is being exploited. And he thinks his pals are a nation.’

‘You don’t believe that, Luke. You were brought up in a country with traditions and you loved them.’

‘It’s a game, Mum. A great game. We only believed in it for as long as it lasted. I love my country for its hills and its inventions, not for its sense of injury, not for its sentimental dream that’s there nobody like us. I’ve been out in the world and I can tell you they’re all bloody like us: desperate and tired and fighting for a way into the modern world. I don’t know what convinced you that building walls would make you better inside.’

‘You’re on the wrong page. It’s changed. This country has a flag!’

‘Dump the flags and the drums and the pipes. They’re for the museum. Like all the junk of all the nations.’

‘Those countries you’ve fought in want to kill us. Those people hate civilisation.’

‘Oh, Mum. Stop reading the

Daily Mail

The band of people who want to kill us are just psychopaths and criminals. They won’t last. And they’ve never even heard of Scotland. Jesus, those

people couldn’t point to their own country on a map.’

‘But you can.’ She went on to tell him he was rootless and cynical. It was a nice conversation, hopeless, going nowhere, but full of the possibilities they each denied. They came alive arguing with each other and so did the country.

‘I might be rootless,’ he said, ‘but I’m not cynical. I love improvement, but I can tell you it doesn’t often arrive in a tank.’

‘Well, remember where you come from,’ she said, ‘if you care for improvement. That’s what we do up here. That’s what we’ve been doing for years now.’

‘Don’t rest on your laurels.’

‘You come from here, Luke.’

‘Do I? I come from here? A person might come from lots of places at the same time and a young person’s sense of humanity won’t confine itself to Dundee.’

‘Oh, Luke!’

‘Don’t Oh-Luke me. Those people in Afghanistan are poorer than you could ever imagine, and they can’t read the books containing the words that they’re willing to die for. But the biggest armies in the world can’t stop them imagining. That’s the truth. They want their tribes and they want their enemies. And so do we.’

‘Oh my,’ she said. ‘Some nations are decent, Luke, and if they want to spread that to backward places then it’s worth it.’

‘Decency?’ Luke said. ‘Do you know why I’ve been drummed out of the army, Mother? Do you want to know exactly? Because my group went into a village where there was a wedding. A small village. People preparing food and playing games and looking after goats. And we were led into a trap but we massacred the whole fucken lot of them. We sprayed them with bullets. We

weren’t even supposed to be there. It wasn’t part of the mission. But we killed them all. Some of those boys were no more than thirteen or fourteen.’

‘I’m sure you—’

‘Don’t be sure, Mum. Don’t be. I was out of my fucken head.’

‘Don’t swear, son.’

‘It was a slaughter in broad daylight. We were smoking spliffs. We were listening to heavy metal. Scots boys. Irish boys and others. All from proud nations. All from freedom-loving nations with statues to philosophers. And then we went into this village …’

‘Son.’

‘No. It was chaos. You want decadence? You want rootlessness? Come to Bad Kichan. I could’ve fired bullets into every building. Into the lady in the wedding dress and the old men and the animals, too. All of them. Just blood. Just the enemy. I didn’t know if I was firing for decency or just gaming. It wasn’t real to me and it’s not real to anybody. So. That’s what I’ve been doing on my holidays, Alice.’

‘Good Lord.’

‘Don’t talk to me about proud nations. That was me. Spreading decency to the world because we have so much to spare.’

‘Oh my.’

‘I’ll never put a uniform on again.’

‘No.’

‘I shamed it and it shamed me.’

Alice was remembering how Sean was the same. He started off believing in all sorts of things for Ireland and by the end he thought the players were part of the same rabble. Maybe it was just hard for soldiers to keep faith. But if Gordon was here he

would put Luke straight on a few things. Nationalism was the way to live in a small country. England had been in charge for long enough and look at the mess they’d made.

‘One of our own boys got killed,’ Luke said. ‘A boy from Dalgarnock. Aged twenty-one.’

‘I know. We saw it on the news.’

Alice slowly shook her head and eventually the mussels came and she ordered more wine. She dipped a piece of bread in the bowl, tasting garlic and herb butter. Being in the Rogano made Alice feel part of something elegant. Gordon might bring her here for St Andrew’s Night and he knew the chef from the markets and was trying to tie them in to an online shop. Luke went outside and when he came back she saw something weary in his handsome face. For the first time, she saw how he might look when he was old. It was a shock, really, because she had never seen his father old. Sean was twenty-six. ‘You still at the smoking?’ she said.

‘I’ll shake it,’ he said. ‘I always start again during a tour. Just being with the boys. They all smoke.’

Alice didn’t know why she needed courage to pat his hand. ‘They said on the news it was drugs. They said the soldiers were smoking drugs.’

‘It catches on. I mean, the boredom. And the Afghans smoke it all day and all night. The boys are like nineteen.’

‘But the major, he wasn’t nineteen, was he? And the newspapers say he was worse than any of them.’ Luke knew there had been stuff in the papers but a public hearing was unlikely.

‘Mum. Just leave it.’

But leaving it just wasn’t Alice. Luke could hear the vague, distant pleasure in her voice as she said the things he didn’t want

to hear. ‘But you’d think a man that age — I mean, practically my age — would know better than to smoke that stuff and then go into a place …’

‘Mum.’

‘… taking boys who can’t see what they’re doing in that state and it was children at a wedding.’

He couldn’t help it but his teeth were gritted when he said it and he felt the heat in his face. ‘Fucking. Stop. Talking,’ he said and he stared hard at her. There was always something weird about Alice’s make-up, as if she didn’t really believe in make-up and was trying it on.

‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re right.’

‘I just can’t talk about it any more.’

Under the table her hands were shaking. It was just like Sean all over again, Sean talking to her, trying to explain something that men don’t want to explain. And even Luke’s voice was the same as his father’s talking about the army. She had the old feeling of not knowing what to say. She didn’t want to provoke him but what about the practical things? Was he out for good? Would anyone be prosecuted for what happened? Would he just live in Glasgow now and settle down and maybe keep away from all this stuff that preyed on his mind?

‘Can I just say something, Luke?’

‘Knock yourself out.’

‘No, not like that. Nothing big.’ She took a gulp of wine and looked away. ‘I was never able to ask her anything about myself.’

‘You mean Gran?’

‘That’s right. I can’t ask. I can’t say, “What happened in my childhood?” or “What was my father really like?”’

‘Why not?’

‘She made it impossible.’

‘But why?’

‘I don’t know. And I’ve always asked myself, “Why can’t she speak to me?” Everybody has questions.’

‘Yes.’ He could see far down into Alice just then, the quiet, lonely life of his mother who was never free of them all.

‘I always felt my presence wasn’t called for.’

‘Mum …’

‘It’s fine. You learn how to live with these things.’ She took another drink. ‘It was always clear I got in the way of some story she had built about her and my father and what they did, who they were. If I had any doubts or any questions I had to put them away. That’s my life.’

‘Maybe that will change,’ Luke said. She looked at him and knew she was looking at him with all the love she had.

God bless him, she thought, for thinking life was something you solved. ‘I was so envious,’ she said, ‘when you were a boy and the two of you were reading those Dickens novels. You were like a gang. You and my mother and her favourite authors.’

‘They were just books.’

‘No, they weren’t. They were passports. You and she went to unknown places together and I was left behind.’

‘Anyone can read them.’

‘Don’t pretend to be shallow, Luke. You know what I mean. She taught you how to look for more out of life.’

‘I suppose she did.’ He could see the pain in her face.

‘She never told me who I was,’ she said. ‘Just who I wasn’t.’

‘Don’t get upset, Mum.’

‘Some people make life bigger for other people. And I’ve always been on the wrong side of that bargain.’

He just felt awkward. He wasn’t going to say things just to soothe her because she was too shrewd for that. He didn’t quite see it but his instinct was still to hold out against his mother, to stall her sentiment and deny her all the small benefits of possession. And she changed the subject after sniffing to clear the air. ‘All that stuff you’re saying, about not belonging anywhere, that’s just the war talking,’ she said. ‘It’s just because of what you went through in Afghanistan. It’s all the stress and what have you. But I think you know where you belong.’

He felt his phone buzz in his pocket and reckoned it would be one of the many texts from the boys in the platoon. He wished he could dive into the carpet and swim to a time when allegiances were clear. The thing he loved about Glasgow was that you never felt truly alone there: a sense of community upbraided you at every corner, but as his eye wandered vacantly over the floor he felt pinched by the local style. ‘Well, Mum,’ he said at last. ‘I wanted life to be more than us. Much more than us. Maybe that’s why I went away in the first place.’

Alice was looking at the old wallpaper. ‘The way my mother spoke to you when you were a boy,’ she said. ‘She hardly spoke to me at all when I was a girl, and there were these long absences, when she was away somewhere, Blackpool probably or on holidays with him, and I stayed with the neighbours. My father I only saw a few times and I can’t picture him ever once lifting me up. He was awkward. He once gave me a doll but I felt it had belonged to somebody else.’

‘Mum.’

‘No, it’s all right. It was different with you and my mother. I remember you saying to her “What’s colour, Granny?” and she pinched your cheek.’

‘I remember that.’

‘And she said, “Colour is light on fire.”’

LANGOUSTINES

When Gordon turned up he was pleased to know the menu better than anybody else and he wanted to argue about fisheries and good governance but Luke asked if they could change the subject. Alice blushed and looked at her husband. They knew Luke was wrong. Gordon stroked his moustache with his bottom lip as a way of not speaking up, though to him it was a pity about his stepson, who obviously went away too young and no longer understood the priorities of his country. He knew nothing about policy and taxes or what makes a people, and now, God help him, he was like those kids who think their country is Google.

‘You’re just not going deep enough,’ Luke said. ‘Money has imploded. Religion has gone mad. Privacy is disappearing. The ice-cap is melting and children are starving to death. And you want to sing an old song about national togetherness.’

‘He does a couple of tours in Afghanistan and suddenly he’s Bill Gates,’ Gordon said.

‘I did four tours in Iraq.’

‘Of course.’

‘You’re not

thinking

.’

‘No,’ Gordon said. ‘We’re thinking, in our own country, about how it’s important to ensure that elderly people can still get their medicine.’

‘Luke,’ Alice said. ‘You’ve always had your head in the clouds. Always the idealist.’

‘Out of touch with reality,’ said Gordon.

‘The games are finished. All bets are off,’ Luke said. ‘We’re living in the big world now.’

‘This is a big enough world for me,’ Gordon said.

‘So why make it smaller?’

‘I thought you wanted to change the subject, Luke,’ his mother said and she smiled without comfort.

Gordon was wearing a yellow sweater. He knew how to make money but didn’t really know how to spend it. It showed on his face, Alice thought, wondering if she was just too caught up in the mystery of her own family’s approval. That was it. When his langoustines came and Gordon sniffed them on the plate she realised his lack of style told against him in a way she tried to ignore. She loved him for his kindness and his politics but not really for himself.

‘You’ll come round,’ she said to Luke. ‘The whole country’s slowly coming round and you will, too.’

After a while they talked about the business of Anne’s photography and the letter that came from Canada. Alice said the photographs were just another part of Anne’s secretive life. She had kept it all back for her private self and her times in Blackpool. ‘If the offer had come even ten years ago’, she said, ‘we’d all have jumped on a plane to Toronto and been proud to see her having her moment.’

Luke didn’t believe it. He didn’t believe there was ever a time like that, when Alice would happily have flown to Toronto to celebrate her mother’s achievement. ‘I don’t think it’s for us to say what happens,’ he said. ‘I don’t know anything about photography but it’s important for her.’

‘She’s just not fit enough,’ Alice said.

‘We’ll see.’

‘You don’t seem to understand something, Luke. I know my mother. I know everything about her.’

But he could see it happening. He was certain the exhibition would take place and that his grandmother would be part of it. He had no idea what it would take, but he knew he would go there, that his mother would come too, and they would see for the first time what Anne had done. He pondered the possibility that his grandmother had once had a fresh vision of life and he wanted to place himself within it. Alice, too: he wanted to put her there, even as she said no. He wasn’t angry at his mother for trying to bury the whole thing.

‘Maybe some day,’ she said.

‘But let’s try.’

She shook her head. It was too late for exhibitions and speeches and trips to Canada. It was enough that they take care of Anne and manage her illness. Alice said her mother didn’t know the difference any more between the past and the present, and Luke suddenly thought of an American poet he’d loved when he was a student, Wallace Stevens. After the lunch he would go to the bookshop and buy the poems.

‘They’re probably worth a bomb, her pictures,’ Gordon said, checking his phone. Luke said he would stand by whatever decision Alice made about the exhibition. Anne’s work, Anne’s life, would take its own course regardless. And Luke would try to help his mother, just help her to overcome all the pain and the mess of her first life.

He felt the strange, loose spreading of the afternoon that comes after a few beers. He could say something. ‘It’s true. I wasn’t always sure myself what was real and what wasn’t.’

‘When?’

‘Out there. On the last tour of duty.’

‘Why was that?’ Alice asked.

‘Too much gaming,’ he said. ‘Too much Dad.’

‘I buried your father in his Royal Western Fusiliers dress uniform. Red hackle and everything.’

‘It’s over,’ Luke said.

Alice just sat when he left the restaurant. Gordon was off talking to the maître d’ and she could hear him laughing, his present-day-ness, all that, making him free.

BOBBY’S BAR

Maureen thought it was funny to see him after all the letters and everything. Just normal, wearing jeans. ‘Don’t ask me how I get to know these things,’ she said to Alice on the phone, ‘but apparently he was in and out the pubs down the town, the wee Saltcoats pubs, you know, that one by the railway station. This was after he saw you in Glasgow. These pubs: dog rough, if you ask me, but there you go. The men like these pubs on a Friday night. The girl who used to work in the wedding shop in Kilwinning was behind the bar. She says he had an alteration with some of them.’

‘An altercation,’ Alice said.

‘That’s right.’

‘Dear God,’ Alice said. ‘I got a text back from him. He said he was fine and heading home.’

‘You don’t grudge a young man a drink, not after what he’s been through. You would sooner he didn’t get into arguments but there’s no controlling men once they’re together, sure there’s not?

Anyway, he came in here in the afternoon after he’d seen you and before he went to the pub. It was funny to see him wearing jeans after the lovely uniform and everything. I’d only seen your Luke in photographs, you see.’

‘He’s looking thin,’ Alice said.

‘He’s a handsome fellow,’ Maureen replied. ‘Anyway, he knows what he’s about. I said if his gran wasn’t in her flat she’d be down there drying her towels. He went off to see Anne and it was about an hour before I saw her in the corridor, dawdling back with her laundry basket. Quite happy. In a wee world of her own.’

Luke ended up in Bobby’s Bar and at one point was standing beside a girl with platinum hair. She had lilac eyes and false eyelashes and was part of a hen night. She said the colour wasn’t real, it was special contact lenses. He was talking to her and lifting shots off the bar and throwing them back, red shots, one after the other. His vision was blurred. He crooked an arm around the girl and she didn’t care one way or the other. ‘She’s spoken for, by the way,’ her friend said.

‘That’s cool,’ he said. ‘I’m off duty. Everybody’s off duty for ever and that’s it.’

The friend just shook her head. She couldn’t decide if she liked his face or not. He was nice and tall but he seemed like trouble. ‘You’re a bit of a thinker,’ she said. She thought he must’ve been a student before or something like that, the way he had a bottle of Evian in the pocket of his bomber jacket.

‘A thinker,’ she repeated.

‘Oh aye. That’s me. Rudyard Kipling.’

Most of the men at the bar were older than him and they couldn’t be bothered with hen parties. They might put a coin in the pot but they were busy talking to each other and looking up at

the television to see the scores. Luke passed out the Red Cola shots to the girls two at a time. ‘Who’s the one daft enough to be getting married?’

‘A real man, at last,’ the lippy one said. Some of the men at the bar looked round and shook their heads. Luke had been shy as a student but he could remember one day walking to the Andersonian Library with the army leaflets and thinking he might be an officer and women would like it. He had been doing an essay on Thomas Hardy and one night he dreamt he was walking in uniform towards a pile of rags. He couldn’t remember the girl in the book he was reading, or the soldier, but he remembered the feeling of power he had, the sense that a woman had taken off her clothes for him and was nearby.

The girls took pictures.

Shrieked.

Downed shots.

Kelly with the lilac eyes grabbed a handful of money from the pot held by the bride-to-be. ‘Our turn,’ she said, smiling a lipstick smile and squeezing into the bar. Luke wondered what her friend’s wedding would be like and imagined men outside the function suite smoking on the steps. The noise of the fruit machine seemed to infect his sense of things, a robust, well-lighted anxiety in the corner. Maybe he had never been enough of a lad to really connect with the whole platoon. He remembered their fear that something big might never happen.

‘What’s your name?’ the girl said.

‘Captain Campbell.’

‘You’re in the army?’

‘I was, aye.’

‘We could tell.’

‘How come?’

‘There’s lots of squaddies in this town. And you can just tell them by the way they stand.’

‘Right.’

‘Not many drink in here, though.’

He looked at the bottles and the masses of postcards and Celtic memorabilia. ‘My name’s Luke.’

‘Check how you stand up straight. And check out your haircut and all that, the tanned face.’

‘Maybe I went to the Sun Splash.’

‘You kiddin’?’ her friend said, eyes bright. ‘There’s nothing you can tell her about fake tan. And that is not a fake tan you are wearing. Take it from the experts.’

Kelly smiled and handed him a shot of something very sweet and green. ‘Apple Sourz,’ she said and the barmaid put the bottle down on the counter. The barmaid seemed to know the girls at the hen party and the bride especially.

‘Oh, that’s pure disgusting,’ one of them said.

Luke ordered a lager top. The girls left in a flurry of plans and proper nouns, places to go next, battle cries and whispered invitations. The lilac-eyed Kelly stood looking for a second. ‘You’re a honey,’ she said, reaching up to kiss him on the lips. Then her fingernails cascaded goodbye in the air.

‘I think you’re in,’ the guy next to him said, nodding in a pair of paint-spattered overalls. The girl behind the bar was looking over at Luke like she knew him. He drank his pint and tried to ignore the buzz of the fruit machine and the telly. Maybe my grandmother never really knew the people in her life, he thought. Maybe none of us do. We didn’t put in the hours. A man in a Celtic top was holding up the European Cup in several

of the photographs pinned up behind the bar.

‘A whisky please; a Talisker.’

There was a barman behind there, too. He reached up and served Luke a decent one. Hand-poured. And Luke felt his mouth was instantly on fire, the whisky burning off the sugar and the nonsense of the previous drinks. His tongue shrank. His family was known for bravery but maybe it had never actually produced a brave man in all these years. He was drunk. The alcohol was now clearing a path to the loneliest part of him and when an Irish song began he stepped outside to smoke.

He had a text from Flannigan in Liverpool, out on the lash with his brother and his schoolmates.

Squad of horror-pigs down here lad total cocknoshes man I h8 them.

Dooley was struggling down in Cork, already champing at the bit to get back for another tour:

Hey Jimmy-Jimmy. Not seen the ladz or heard much fm the bitches but bored man still thinking about Ops. Weird shit sir and douche bags in the papers don’t know nothing. Totally misinformative. Im in car park waiting for Rosie to get off fuckn work have you seen the ladz?

He smoked and used the thumb of his other hand to text back his mother.

Thanks. I’m down seeing Gran but going back up to Glasgow tonight.

He wondered if other people had to think before leaving kisses. The Kilmarnock bus via Pennyburn passed and he took in the emptiness on the upper deck. Nothing is emptier than an empty bus. Seagulls drifted over the railway station and music came pounding from one of the lounge bars at the end of Countess Street. Lennox sent him a smiley face, the third that day, a solitary smiley face. To Luke it said all the things the ginger nut was trying to say. He could see Lennox talking like a hero in some Belfast pub with the boys around him lapping it up. Then Lennox would go to the jacks and piss his wages into the metal trough remembering faraway mortars and shouts down there in the valley. Leaning on the tiles and texting smiley faces to the captain.

He wrote back:

Hey Andy. Keep smiling mate.

There’s no such thing as a quiet drink. Not for Luke, anyway, and not in Bobby’s Bar on a Friday. Luke went in and out of the general cheer and at one point was chuckling to himself on a bar-stool as the noise level rose. A man in an anorak came up when Luke was past caring about military decorum or the last train. ‘I’m not being cheeky, pal,’ the guy said, ‘but can I ask you, were you in the Royal Caledonians?’ Luke turned. He swayed and the man with his hands in his pockets was still speaking. It was a question. ‘Is that your regiment?’

‘Who’s asking?’ The man was on a reluctant mission but he had something invested in carrying it off. Honour, Luke supposed, and honour was the thing that ruined a man’s happiness. He wiped his mouth and gripped the bar. Next minute he was over in the corner talking to a very fat man. Even in drink, Luke

could see the man was wider than the copper table covered in empty tumblers and packs of Regal King Size.

‘I think you knew my son.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Mark McNulty.’

Luke knew right away. He had known the boy was local. He’d known there was a chance when he came into the town. And even through the fog of drink he knew it was the boy’s father, the soldier called Mark who was killed at Bad Kichan. He suddenly saw the boy in the terrible heat of Helmand, smiling kid, eager as anything, one of the detachment squirting him with sunscreen by the ruined fort. Looking into his father’s face and putting his hand into his, Luke saw again the boy’s fury as he shouted in the road and he saw Rashid lifting his gun and shooting him at close quarters. He saw again the boy being hit and the copper bowls erupting and the blood that came from the boy’s mouth.

‘I recognised you from the papers,’ Mr McNulty was saying. Luke was still standing next to the tables. He wanted the boy’s father to come outside to speak in private, just for a moment, because he hadn’t expected to meet him like this and he was trying to become the captain again despite being drunk. The gesture the man made with his hands made it clear he was stuck and didn’t want to move outside.

‘We won’t be long,’ he said.

‘I wasn’t with the Caledonians,’ Luke said, sitting down. ‘I was a captain with the Royal Western Fusiliers.’

Mr McNulty stared.

‘We have a long tradition of combat. Fighting in war zones all over the world.’

‘What is this, a careers talk?’

Luke wasn’t sure what to say. He wanted to open up with something official and grand, providing a dignified context to the condolences he intended to offer. It was hard to do this after all the drink. ‘It’s a long tradition, Mr McNulty and … many men have given their lives.’

‘Oh, aye. Very good. And do you have a long tradition of taking twenty-one-year-old boys off the beaten track and having them murdered by people on your own side?’ The man was red with anger, his hand shaking over his glass and then quickly wiping his mouth.

‘Mr McNulty, we were ambushed. There was nothing we could do. He was a brave soldier.’

‘Oh fuck off.’

‘We …’

‘Just fuck off. Brave soldier. He was a silly wee boy who thought he could see the world. Fucking running into bullets since he was about eight years old. And then he really ran into one, didn’t he? They say he wanted a square-go with the Taliban and next thing he’s back here in a box. Broke his mother’s heart. He’s over in the graveyard, Captain. My wee boy’s over in the graveyard and you can tell me whenever you’re ready what it was for, because they sent some medals, but maybe you can explain them to me, each one, the silver one, what was that for?’

‘I’m sorry, Mr McNulty. This isn’t the place.’

‘It’s as good as any place.’ He looked up at the two behind the bar and shouted out, ‘Hey, Brian. I didnae realise you were inviting the British army into the bar these days!’

Luke was staring at the man and he tried not to think about his own father and how he had died for Ireland. ‘I’m not going to

argue with you, Mr McNulty. I’m just very sorry. Your son was a brave man and it shouldn’t have happened.’

‘Oh, he was a fucking pest. Joining the army. I don’t know where you’re from but we’re not army people. And he goes and gets himself fucking killed into the bargain.’

‘He did his best.’

‘No, he didn’t. He died, son. He died for nothing. And people like you can say what you like. You sent my boy back in a box and now you’re drinking in my pub.’

Luke stood up.

‘He didn’t die for nothing, Mr McNulty.’

‘He was a fucking idiot.’

IF U B WEIRD WITH ME I’LL B ANGRY

How easy to go from being one with responsibilities to being nothing at all in a nightclub queue. A man who was boss of a platoon section out there in history, an officer, yes, making decisions in the hot fuckery of life, now swaying in the line for the Metro with a nearly dead iPhone in your hand and surrounded by people ten years younger.

If u b weird with me I’ll b angry.

That’s what the text from Lennox said.

And to the clubbers you’re just a pissed guy with no friends. You’re a dude in the wrong clothes. So you start a conversation with them and they’re a bit embarrassed at first but they pass you the joint. And after a while in the queue you buy some coke off

the boy in the white high-tops and you stick it in your boxers and get past the bouncers by straightening up. You expect nothing of the kids but they surprise you by proving you right. Inside the club they veer off into a red pumping chasm of secret belonging and you wander to the bar where some boys gather and you find it hard to believe they’re the same age as Dooley.

You drink sambuca. Jägerbombs. And then the girl Kelly comes out of the smoke all sweaty from the dance floor. You kiss her and she says ‘you’re really nice’ but she can’t put her number into your phone because your phone is dead and anyway the laughter. She pulls you onto the dance floor and she whoops and you say ‘I don’t dance’ and yet the lights bring you out and you find some version of yourself you didn’t know. You try to talk him down and then you give in to the lights and the girl is lost and you’re still there.

Oh, Luke. You never put in the hours. And then a minute comes that brings you out of yourself. You see the girl again and she’s laughing big-eyed and you like how it feels and you tell her to follow you up to the bogs. You snort two more lines each and then you fuck in the cubicle, the girl talking ten to the dozen with the music deep below. Her legs are balanced on your forearms and you’re fucking her standing up and kissing her neck and she says something good. You’re back downstairs, you see the lights again, the kids with their hands in the air. You hear the old dark emptiness behind you and you turn and smile, feeling for one mad moment you’re at home in the beat. The music is beautiful and you take a mouthful of water, so cold you could drink the sea, and suddenly you’re outside the club. You float over the pavement and crouch by the door of Cancer Care, puking your guts up, and then you suck from the bottle in your jacket pocket, rub some coke on your teeth and think of Scullion.

ARRAN

A box was sitting in the doorway of the charity shop. It contained books and shirts and a small fire extinguisher covered in stickiness and dust. He took it. When he walked down Windmill Street he felt exposed again as if the mirrors of the cars were conscious. He looked round to see a closed chippy and a washing-machine repair shop, and there, in darkness, facing the sea, was the Army Careers Office. He didn’t look in or think about anything much, he just raised the fire extinguisher above his head and threw it at the window. He expected an alarm but the glass didn’t break and he staggered away.

A boat was roped to an orange buoy. The water came in around it and a bird stood on the prow, the boat rocking, the bird looking into the night and cawing, as Luke sat on the wall. It was perfectly dark out there. The bird would attempt the crossing if she could be sure to make it. Luke just stared at the creature and willed her to go, as if, with a surge of courage, she might conquer the reality of sky and whatever else.

Lochranza Court was behind him. He looked back, seeing a dim light. The corridor was never dark and it amazed him suddenly to think what stories the building must contain. His gran was there and the lady next door, Maureen, the one who wrote the letters, she must be asleep, also. He wondered if the women slept well, or did their experience keep them awake? He could still see his mother in the restaurant the day before, the worry on her face as she spoke about never knowing who she was. For the first time in his life he felt sorry for his mother and wanted to know more about what had estranged her from the woman who lived across the road. Once the war is over, what is there but life? He pulled the jacket around his ears and looked at the building, just thinking of them.

When he visited earlier that day, he’d found his gran beside the window in the laundry room, and he’d been sure she was speaking to something in her handbag, perhaps the rabbit. She looked up and called him Harry and then she remembered his own name. She took his hand and said yes, of course, he was Luke and he had been away. Just sitting in the room, he realised there was so much to find out about her, so much to do for her. And perhaps for all of them. He said he was home now and she brightened. ‘That’s really nice,’ she said. ‘I want to go on a journey with you.’

‘Where?’

‘To Blackpool.’ She rubbed his hands by the window and touched the object in her bag and said very clearly to both of them that life was only what you made it. ‘They were our best years. Lovely times. I think there are photographs down there in Blackpool.’

‘You’ve wanted to go for ages, haven’t you?’

‘Yes. Since the snow.’

Sitting on the wall, he smoked a cigarette, watched the water. It was a loss of spirit that had occurred in him, a loss of make-believe, that’s how he thought of it, and he knew it meant he would have to start again. The waves arrived on the sand and they bubbled there and he liked it, seeing the white froth and how it disappeared in front of him. He later wished he could capture the peace he had known over those hours on the seawall as he looked into the black distance, the lighthouse on the Holy Isle beating out a message just for him. The mountains of Arran he felt he had seen in another time, a recent one, but there was no gunfire or flares, no broken sleep, no enemy below, just the mountains themselves, the steady return of the fishing boats and the light that came with the morning.