The Papers of Tony Veitch

39

It was half-past one in the morning and it was raining. Gus and Laidlaw were standing near the end of the queue for taxis outside Central Station. It seemed a suitable ending to an evening that had turned into a belated wake for Tony Veitch.

They had improvised their way from pub to pub, disgorging opinions, feelings, odd confessions as they went. In the Wee Mann’s Laidlaw had worked out that the answer to one of Tony’s riddles was the pyramids. In the Virginian Gus had explained that the answer to the other was Tony himself. In Charlie Parker’s, chosen by Gus in the mood of a belligerent fifth-columnist, Laidlaw claimed to see the point of the riddles.

‘Eats an egg and tastes feathers,’ he said. ‘Is everybody else’s pupil,’ he said. ‘The bones of the many housing the bones of the few,’ he said. ‘Individual sensitivity,’ he said, ‘and the need for ordinary lives to be seen as the most important things in society. Maybe that’s what the papers were trying to say. Maybe the papers are what we should be trying to live with our lives.’

In the Corn Exchange Gus cried a little, quietly, and Laidlaw struggled not to join him. They had attacked the city as if they meant to drink it dry, finishing up in Ad Lib after one in the morning, toying with hamburgers and slaughtering the house red. Now in that complicated drunken way, they had worked out that Gus was going to take a taxi to his flat, where Marie presumably thought he had emigrated, and Laidlaw would share it with him as far as the Burleigh Hotel.

‘Well,’ Gus said, wrapping the thought round him like the coat neither of them had. ‘Not be long now. There’s no place like home.’

‘That’s right,’ Laidlaw said. ‘Not even home.’

He didn’t bother explaining his cryptic wisdom.

He couldn’t have faced articulating the irony against which his marriage had finally foundered, how Gina had kept the envelope on which he had written the phone-number for her, containing his address, had looked up his number and phoned the house several times, asking for him. Ena’s misunderstanding was nevertheless an accurate measurement of what had happened to them and they both knew it. They had agreed he had better move out. The thought of the possible effects on the children was like a future of endless guilt. The memory of the family he had come from made him feel he had betrayed his own past. The decision proliferated into a warren of problems in his mind. Tonight had been like an unsuccessful attempt to postpone them.

But bleak as his moment was, the city wouldn’t leave him alone. Looking around him, he felt that maybe this was as near to home as he was going to get, the streets of this place. The queue was about the size of a small football crowd and in the smirring rain it should have been a formula for misery. But the place was jumping joyously.

A small man was passing along the line, playing a mouth-organ and collecting money. He appeared to have found the instrument because he didn’t once deviate into a tune. He just made watery clusters of sound. When somebody asked for a request, he said, ‘Away tae hell. Ah don’t play tunes.’

Reaching into his pocket to reward impertinence, Laidlaw took out a handful of coins, selected a couple and remarked philosophically to Gus, ‘Notice that, when you’re on the batter? Finish up with pockets like a street-bookie. See, you always buy with notes. Coins are beneath you. You become a whisky-millionaire.’

The man was earning his money. His jaunty noise was the drunken pulse of the group. People were laughing and shouting, vivid rain-streaked faces and loud voices, a queue by Hogarth. A group of women had emerged to dance like maenads around the small man. The whole line was a weird, dynamic unity, like a centipede on LSD.

A small, old woman standing behind Laidlaw tapped him on the shoulder. He turned round.

‘Son,’ she said. ‘This is the best queue I’ve ever been in in my life.’

Laidlaw was laughing and he elaborately gestured her out of the queue to dance. Watching them jig sedately up and down the pavement, Gus drunkenly thought he was seeing something marvellous, a spirit so determined to enjoy life that it had an aesthetic of queues.