The Papers of Tony Veitch

28

There was no perchance about it. There is a mildly disturbing sense of activity that surrounds the discovery of a death in a city, like the buzzing of flies. It is a small distraction in normalcy. The longest running show on earth has come to town and that fascination with dangerous tricks that can dilate with a little wonder the most blasé eyes claims its craners for the riskiest feat of all.

What looked like the advance publicity for someone’s last performance was waiting for them. They knew the signs. As they crossed Queen Margaret Bridge they could see ahead of them, at the corner beyond the bridge where you turn left into Kelvin Drive, three or four people standing. They had the unselfconsciousness of bystanders, a preoccupation like people in a painting. They were practitioners of a style that must have had its representatives at the crucifixion. One of them was pointing towards what Laidlaw knew was his destination.

‘No. No,’ he said in that way we incant against events we fear have already happened.

That the event had by now hardened into itself he saw in the old woman’s face looking out from the nearby window of a private house with nebby curiosity, as if misfortune was lowering the tone of the neighbourhood, and in the parked cars he recognised as belonging to the police and in the uniformed constable who let them in.

The house had been impressive, a fact which worked against it now, just as an old fur-coat can look shabbier than second-hand nylon. The balustrade with thin columns that must have been a proud feature in the past was scruffy with lack of paint. The sagging balcony looked like the kind of place the upstairs residents would only avail themselves of to avoid a greater hazard, like a fire.

The inside of the building was what had made its outside begin to admit it wasn’t what it had thought it was. One house had become eight flats. Laidlaw remembered where Gus Hawkins stayed and wondered about all the cities where the young and the unassimilated aging must be camping out in the compromised convictions of the past, seeding them with unfamiliar dreams, possibilities for which they hadn’t been intended. As soon as he came in he had a strong sense of the place, could imagine strange laughters late at night, someone playing music alone.

It was where Tony Veitch had tried to live, a confusion of smells and sounds and eccentricities, a place where curry argued with fried eggs and, he could imagine, strange thoughts grew. Laidlaw wondered if coming here had been for Tony less of a hiding from things than where he had been. It was the kind of place Milton Veitch had perhaps never thought about. It was a houseful of communal loneliness.

They went up the stairs to where Laidlaw now knew they would find yet another demonstration of the final loneliness. The constable at the door had said, ‘Aye, that’s right, sir. There’s a body upstairs. I don’t know the name. But he won’t be needing it any more.’ Detectives were making enquiries of the other residents but apparently not many of them were in. Spending Sunday in a place like this would be like visiting your grave. Tony Veitch wouldn’t have to do that again.

He was closer to blond than his photographs had suggested. Lying on the floor of the room that was both sitting-room and bedroom, he was dressed in jeans and tee-shirt, his feet bare. His head was turned sideways, eyes closed, as if he had suddenly passed out. He was a very good-looking boy. His right arm was stretched out over the record-player on the floor, his hand rigid above the turn-table. He looked like someone who had fallen asleep changing records. But he hadn’t been changing records. Around his right wrist was a piece of metal that looked like an identity-bracelet. But it wasn’t an identity-bracelet. The skin around it was black. The metal was just wire. He was plugged in to the socket.

‘That’s not the only thing,’ Milligan said. ‘He’s got flex wrapped round the body. Wired up like a Trafalgar Square Christmas tree. He wasn’t kidding. Don’t touch. He’s got enough electricity in him to light up Sauchiehall Street.’

Milligan was in control. He was enjoying it.

‘You’ve arrived in time for the funeral,’ he said and winked at Harkness.

Harkness looked guiltily at Laidlaw and thought he seemed displaced in the busyness of the room where the others were searching, dusting for fingerprints. The body had just been photographed. Laidlaw was staring around as if he could find something here that nobody else had managed to.

What he was finding was a feeling he had experienced before, that death is the end of small things, lets us absorb its enormity through trivial negatives, like infinity measured in inches. Maybe that was why some people were casual about it.

There was an empty cup on the mantelpiece with the crumpled wrapper of a chocolate biscuit beside it. The smallness of that cup, unfillable ever again by Tony Veitch, was big enough to hold his death. Laidlaw remembered finding one glove belonging to his father in a drawer soon after his death. It was one of a pair someone had given him for his Christmas. He had only worn them once since he belonged to a generation of men who seldom wore coats, let alone gloves, not out of any macho impulse but because coats had been a luxury for so long that they never got used to them. The accidental find in the drawer had held the irrevocable pain of his father’s dying so that it seemed at the time there couldn’t be much that was more poignant than a dead man’s empty glove. The cup came close.

He looked again at Tony Veitch lying dead in a small bare room. He wished he could have spoken to him. But if he couldn’t speak to him, Laidlaw wanted something.

‘Papers,’ he said suddenly.

Milligan turned towards him from his energetic supervision of things.

‘Newspapers?’

‘Paper that you write on.’

‘Why? Should there be?’

‘The boy was writing all the time. There should be acres of paper here. Did you find any?’

Milligan looked at Harkness as if he was Laidlaw’s keeper and should have better control of him.

‘You didn’t know that about him?’ Laidlaw said. ‘He’s just a corpse to you, isn’t he?’

‘He’s just a corpse to everybody now,’ Milligan said. ‘But I’ll tell you what I do know. I know I found him. First. That’s more than you did. Cock of the walk.’

‘That’s something that puzzles me,’ Laidlaw said. ‘When you know so little about him, how did you manage that?’

Milligan smiled and tapped his nose, pointed at Laidlaw.

‘I know this city,’ he said. ‘Right to its underwear. That’s why I’m a winner.’ He turned to Harkness. ‘Squared things up with the wife today as well. We’re getting back together. Everything’s coming up roses.’

Harkness cringed, and heard his feeling expressed by Laidlaw.

‘You should get them to give you the boy’s head for above your mantelpiece. A wee house-warming present for your wife.’

The others in the room were aware of the tension Laidlaw was generating. One of them defused it.

‘There were papers,’ he said.

‘Where?’

He led Laidlaw and Harkness through to the bathroom. Small feathers of ash on the floor drifted about with the movement of their coming in. The lavatory-bowl was black with the ashes of burnt paper.

‘Looks as if he’s been burning the Mitchell Library,’ the man said.

Looking into the bowl, Laidlaw noticed that the few words which had survived were worn to meaningless smudges with the water, as accessible as runes.

‘There was nothing left?’ he asked.

‘One sheet. It had fallen under the table.’

They went back through to the living-room and Laidlaw asked Milligan for the sheet. Milligan was glad he had asked. ‘Are you kidding?’ he said. ‘You want it, you wait for it.

This is my show. I’ll see about letting you have a photocopy when I’m ready. But you’ll have to wait for it.’

Laidlaw stood staring ahead. Harkness was embarrassed for him.

‘Jack.’

‘We’ll wait,’ Laidlaw said. He was speaking loud enough for everybody to hear. ‘When you’ve got somewhere you have to go, you don’t get put off by a dog barking at you.’

Harkness was speaking confidentially.

‘It’s over, Jack.’

‘It’s over for him. But not for us. The dead are our responsibility, aren’t they? That’s what the job says.’

Harkness was looking at him. Laidlaw’s face looked as set as a death-mask.

‘Jack. You’re over-reacting. Just because Big Ernie chewed you over.’

Laidlaw was lighting a cigarette. He lit it, looked at Harkness and smiled.

‘Like being savaged by a chihuahua,’ he said.

He meant it. Their discomfort didn’t matter here. Laidlaw looked again at Tony Veitch. That Laidlaw knew so little about the boy paradoxically made him more hurt. The fussiness of the others moving about the shabby room was mocked by that terrible immobility. The corpse compelled Laidlaw by its inaccessible nature, the way figures talking behind glass can fascinate because they are unheard. He learned that incomprehensible image like a rune he must try to decipher. He stood staring at Tony Veitch, letting the haunting and mysterious stillness of that destroyed youth brand itself painfully on his mind.