The Papers of Tony Veitch

16

^‘Yesterday all my mogres seemed so far away.

Now Ah’m paintin’ every bloody day.

Ah’ve chinged ma mind. Gi’es yesterday.’

The singing led them to the house. It was near the top of the road, past Hillhead Parish Church. The big double doors were lying open with a piece of cardboard against the jamb with ‘Wet Paint’ painted on it. Two men in stained white boilersuits were painting the groundfloor windows on either side of the door. The one on the left, a florid man in his fifties, was working at ground level. The other, about thirty and in need of a shave, was up a ladder because his window was above the basement flat. He was the singer. His improvised lyric had tailed off into Glaswegian mouth-music: ‘Ta-ta-reetin-deetin-beetin-bu-ta-reeting-du-da-reeting-du.’

It was a big, handsome house, three-storeyed with a long, low modern dormer window. Its Victorian portentousness, basking in the sunshine, was undermined somewhat by the nine push-buttons inset in its front. The names listed beside the buttons testified to the contemporary identity crisis being undergone by a building constructed out of a formidable self-assurance. No doubt it felt a certain affinity with James R. P. S. MacKenzie and Miss L. S. Booth-Williams. But the basement claimed to be occupied by ‘Maggie, Jeanne, Sarah and Mad Liz.’ Flat 9 said ‘The Friends of Che.’

‘Lookin’ for Mad Liz, boays?’ the singer asked. He pointed downwards. ‘She dwelleth in the nether regions. A right big cracker. An’ daft as a brush. The perfect combie.’

Laidlaw laughed and Harkness waved and they went in past the payphone in the hall. As they climbed the stairs, they heard the preoccupied conversation of the painters through the open door.

‘She’s no’ that mad that she fancies you anyway,’ the older man said.

‘Harry! They all fancy me. Ah carry a pocketful o’ stones tae throw at them. Ah’ve got tae protect maself. Why d’ye think Ah go hame a different road every night? Tae avoid all these birds in ambush.’

‘Ye couldny get yer end away at an orgy.’

‘Anyway, Ah don’t think yon was Mad Liz.’

‘The big blondie?’

‘Nah. Ah didny fancy her anyway. Like a prop-forward wi’ tits. Pa-ra-dee-pa-ra-rutin-dutin-beedle-be. .’

Flat 9 was up a final small stair to what had been part of the attic. Laidlaw knocked on the Yale-locked door.

‘Aye. Who’s that?’

Laidlaw made a face that meant he didn’t talk to doors and knocked again. There was something said that sounded like ‘Oh to hell,’ a pause, and the door opened.

‘Guthrie Hawkins?’

He grimaced. ‘Gus Hawkins.’

He wore only a pair of jeans. He was early twenties, with blue direct eyes that looked as if they wouldn’t have been intimidated by a regiment. His hair was black, cut rough and ruffled. He was fairly short but his bare torso was so blatant with power height would have been overstatement. When his eyes came up from Laidlaw’s identity-card they had grown a skin of distance.

‘What’s this about?’

‘It’s about Tony Veitch.’

‘Again?’ he said and smiled. ‘You going to wait there a minute, please?’ He closed the door on them.

When it opened again, he was carrying a v-necked sweater. He pulled it over his head as they came in.

The door opened directly on to the one-roomed flat. To the left of it hung a curtain of blue and white plastic strips, separating the cooker, sink and some cupboards from the rest of the room. There were three beds, two of them with cushions decorating their neatness. The third bed had signs of having been hastily made up, suggestive wrinkles showing beneath its coverlet.

But the essence of the place wasn’t in the sparseness of its furnishings. It was in what had grown in their interstices. The walls were a collage defying interpretation. Che Guevara was surrounded by Thurber cartoons, his handsome romanticism as decontextualised as a tragedian on a tube-train. There were various photographs and drawings obviously cut out of books: Marx, Camus, T. S. Eliot, Socrates, John Maclean pointing an admonitory finger at the world, Marlon Brando refusing to give Eva Marie Saint back her glove in On the Waterfront, Hemingway studiedly being Hemingway. There were prints of ‘Old Woman Cooking an Egg’, Pisarro’s ‘Peasant Digging’ and Breughel’s ‘Icarus’ with a typewritten sheet beside it containing Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’. There was a postcard from Pollok House showing ‘Adam Naming the Beasts’ and ‘Eve Naming the Birds’. Most conspicuously, there were books, the real furniture. They covered the place like a fungoid growth, having proliferated from the single three-tiered bookshelf into piles on the floor.

The images all around were like holes drilled in the drab walls, offering strange vistas. Together with the books, they were a denial not just of the room but of the city beyond it, a refusal to have vision circumscribed by circumstances.

Laidlaw felt immediately two things: that just by standing here he was closer to Tony Veitch, could take the pulse of his comprehensible strangeness, knew a little better where he came from; that he was looking at a lost part of himself. He stood among the complex and incompatible idealisms of youth and remembered having been there. Remembering that, he had the grace to be aware that he was alien. Middle-age was a foreign country here. This was a shrine to youth, where compromise was like a profanation.

The girl emphasised the feeling in him. She had pulled on jeans and T-shirt. She had mules on her bare feet. Her recent vulnerability was her embarrassment now. Her breasts seemed too conspicuous, as if she knew the three men in the room were too aware of them. The intense privacy of what she had been involved in had been made public before she was ready. Her shyness was an indictment. Laidlaw felt guilty.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry we disturbed you. I’m Jack Laidlaw. This is Brian Harkness. We won’t be long.’

‘That’s all right,’ Gus Hawkins said. ‘This is Marie.’

Laidlaw liked him at once. Considering the varieties of embarrassment and aggression and deceit the arrival of the police gave rise to, Laidlaw liked the cool directness of the boy’s response. Gus leaned back on his elbow on the bed they had been making love on, and wore his preposterous health like an aureole. He knew whatever happened he could handle it.

Marie put out two chairs for them and sat on the third remaining chair. Gus gestured them to sit down. Laidlaw admired his style and, admiring it, couldn’t resist trying to disconcert it.

‘You said “again”,’ he said.

‘Sorry?’

‘When I mentioned Tony Veitch. You said, “Again?” Who’s been asking about him?’

‘People.’

‘I’d worked that out. What people, though? You see, it could be important. You could be withholding vital information.’

Gus Hawkins held out both hands, palms up, wrists together. Laidlaw and Harkness managed not to smile.

‘Naw,’ Gus Hawkins said. ‘Don’t take me away. Just friends at the uni. There seems a lot of fuss about Tony. So what’s he done?’

‘As far as I’m concerned, he’s disappeared. We’d like to find him.’

‘I don’t know where he is.’

‘No ideas at all about where he might go?’

‘I’ve checked them all. D’you think I wouldn’t?’

‘Well, maybe you could tell us something that might help us to find him.’

Gus sat up on the bed and clasped his hands, elbows resting on his knees. He stared at the floor for a time and looked up, seeming to have made a decision.

‘You want a cup of coffee?’

‘That would be great,’ Harkness said.

‘I’ll get it,’ Marie said.

‘Would you, love? Thanks. Okay, I’ll tell you what I can.’

Laidlaw wondered why.

‘Did you know he was going to take off? I mean, did he give any indication of it?’

‘Not really. Not any more than at any other time. He could’ve shot the crow at any time during the last year or so, Tony. He had become allergic to the uni.’

‘So how did it happen?’

‘Well, I’d given him the place to himself for the week of the finals. I’ve just finished Junior Honours, right? I look in a couple of times during the week. To see if I could help. Like Anglo-Saxon vocabulary or something. Or check references for him maybe. Last time I saw him was on the Thursday night. He seemed all right. Bit of a zombie, the way everybody is at the finals. Your head standing in for a filing-cabinet. But he was all right. Reckoned he had done pretty well so far. Then Saturday.’

He shook his head. His eyes rediscovered the puzzlement he must have felt then.

‘I come in on Saturday morning. The door’s not even shut. It’s lying open. I push it. And it’s like coming aboard the Mary Celeste. I knew there was something wrong. I mean, there was no reason why he should be here. It wasn’t that. It was just — the room hadn’t been left, it had been abandoned. There was a full cup of coffee sitting on the floor. A couple of drawers hanging out where he had emptied them. About half-a-dozen books scattered round the floor, all open. I looked in the cupboard and his travelling-bag was gone. And that was it. Never seen him since.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I checked with the uni. He hadn’t turned up. I went round some of the places I thought he might be. Pubs and that. No joy. I don’t know why he went, but he really meant it. Even took his music centre.’

‘Was he in any kind of trouble that you know of? We spoke to Mr Jamieson at the University-’

Gus Hawkins allowed the distribution of coffee-mugs to defer the question. Laidlaw had Snoopy. Harkness was drinking out of a 19th-century remedy for rheumatism. Marie gave out milk and sugar. Harkness thought she was an attractive girl.

‘Not that I know of.’

‘Did Tony know a man called Paddy Collins?’

Gus tested the hotness of the coffee.

‘That sounds familiar. I think he’s mentioned him.’

‘He knew him well?’

‘Tony didn’t know anybody well.’

‘What do you mean? He was a loner?’

‘Not by choice. He tried to mix. But he was oil and everybody else was water. He just sat on the surface. He thought he knew people. He probably thought every casual chat was soul-talk. He was naive.’

‘In what way?’

‘Look. You could show Tony’s development geographically. Without going outside Byres Road. And that’s pathetic. You know what he did? When he came here? He was here before me. We’ve talked about it often. He spent a year in the Salon in Vinicombe Street. Just down the road there. Seeing some pictures three times. Whatever they were showing, that’s what he saw. If it was Tom and Jerry, he was there. He was hiding from the shock of real life. Then in his second year he did his Captain Scott. He started to go into the Rubaiyat. Then the Curlers. Then Tennents. Do you know what I mean?’

Laidlaw thought he knew. The three pubs are all in Byres Road. He supposed Gus Hawkins meant that Tony’s progress had been towards some idea of a working-class pub.

‘Then he went beyond Partick Cross. He was Vasco da Gama. The Kelvin. The Old Masonic Arms. Next stop, outer space.’

‘That’s where he seems to be now. There must have been some indication of him being under pressure.’

‘Everybody doing finals is under pressure. You don’t need the doctor’s bag to work that out.’

‘You think that’s all it was?’

Gus seemed to be savouring his coffee.

‘As far as I know.’

‘So you think he’ll turn up again?’

‘Haven’t a clue.’

‘Did you ever meet Tony’s father?’

‘No. He mentioned him a couple of times.’

‘Not more than that?’

‘Well, he seemed to put him in roughly the same bracket as leukaemia. I don’t suppose that’s something you’d want to bum about a lot.’

‘Lynsey Farren?’

‘I’ve seen her.’

‘And?’

‘Pleasant enough to talk to if you’ve got the dark bins on. She dresses like Blackpool Illuminations.’

‘What more do you know about her?’

‘She’s some kind of hand-knitted Scottish aristocracy, is she not? I just thought somebody should’ve taken the after-birth out of her eyes. I thought she was dangerously naive. But then I think most people are.’

‘Including Tony?’

‘Aye. Especially to himself.’

‘Does the name Eck Adamson mean anything to you?’

‘The old wino?’

‘That’s right.’

‘He’s been here a coupla times. Bumming off Tony.’

‘Not off you?’

‘I don’t invest in lost causes.’

‘You know when they’re lost, do you?’

‘I’ve got a fair idea.’

‘Lucky you. You reckon Tony’s one? A lost cause.’

‘I don’t know. I just think his naivety’s dangerous. Like psychic TNT, that stuff. And he had every pocket stuffed with it. It was like he’d lived so long in a sterile unit. I suppose money’s like that. Every half-boiled idea that touched him, he came down with it. He had no resistance. Because reality wasn’t where he lived. It was where he was trying to go. I mean, he’s very bright. But his brightness has no antibodies.’

‘I don’t get you,’ Harkness said.

Gus’s eyes took in the girl, looked at Harkness.

‘He gave you his face like a blank cheque. You know?’ He was enjoying holding court. ‘Anything different from what he’d had was hooking him. He mainlined anecdotes about working-class life. I used to tell him daft things. Like eating porridge out a drawer. Things I’ve only heard of. And say they happened to me. I wasn’t being nasty. Well, maybe just a wee bit.’ He smiled reflectively. ‘Mainly, I was taking the piss to teach him a lesson. Like cold turkey. But it never worked. But I liked him. Tony was all right at that time.’

‘Your liking’s past tense,’ Laidlaw said. ‘What happened?’

‘Aw, listen. I still like him. When he’s gone the rest of the road, I hope I catch up with him again.’

‘But you wouldn’t know where?’

‘No. All I mean is when the revolution comes, I hope they don’t shoot Tony. He’s one rich guy worth saving.’

‘Eck Adamson’s dead. Did you know that?’

His face gave no response.

‘No. I didn’t. But I knew it was coming.’

‘How?’

‘He worked hard at it, didn’t he?’

‘Well, actually, he got a bit of help. He was poisoned.’

‘How did they find one he hadn’t tried already?’

‘Paraquat.’

‘Aye, I suppose that would work.’

‘Oh, it did. Had you seen him lately?’

‘Tony mentioned he had been here the last night I saw him.’

‘Did he mention anything specific about the meeting?’

Gus shook his head.

‘Anything else you can think of?’

Gus shook his head. Laidlaw looked at the girl. She had spent almost the whole time watching Gus Hawkins. She looked as if her eyes were voting Gus for God. Gus looked as if he would second that.

‘What does your brother do?’ Laidlaw asked.

Gus looked up at him very carefully.

‘Sorry?’

‘I hear you’ve got a brother. What does he do?’

Gus gave him a slow, dazzling smile like the beam of a searchlight: halt, you have been spotted.

‘I wonder,’ he said. ‘I must ask him sometime.’

Laidlaw surrendered.

‘Well, thanks for your help.’

‘And for the coffee,’ Harkness said to Marie.

Laidlaw paused, noticing two picture frames on the bookshelf. They didn’t contain pictures. Inside each was a hand-written poem. Laidlaw recognised Tony Veitch’s writing. He went over for a closer look.

I am the one

Who scratches before he itches

Brings the weather indoors

Sees the pig in the rasher

Eats an egg and tastes feathers

Is everybody else’s pupil.

‘Tony called them word-photos,’ Gus said.

‘Has he written to you since he disappeared?’ Laidlaw asked.

‘He did, actually. A long letter about Marxism. Trying to show me the error of my ways. I’ve lost it.’

We are big, abandoned, bleached by sun.

We are the absence of everyone.

Held by void, we hold it,

Finite dimensions round the infinite.

We are the bones of the many

Housing the bones of the few.

‘But photos of what?’ Laidlaw said.

‘Well, they’re riddles.’ Gus was laughing. ‘You’re supposed to work them out for yourself.’

‘Just like some people’s conversation,’ Laidlaw said as they went out.

‘Not a silly boy,’ Harkness said in the car.

‘No. A bit more clued up than we are at the moment. You going to drop me off at the Burleigh? Must be this case but I’m going to need the migraine pills. You take time off and see the lady of your choice. Pick me up later for East Kilbride. How many women are you perming from these days?’

Harkness didn’t think it was funny.