All the Colours of the Town

Already she is smiling, one foot on the stairs. She stops to listen. She isn’t scared. This is a game they play most nights. It’s important to have a story, a pretext. This is part of the game. She stands on the top step and listens for a sound, for something she can use when she gets downstairs, when her mother will turn towards her with that expression. ‘I heard a noise,’ the girl will say. ‘I was scared.’

Her mother is the problem. Her dad will let her stay. If she makes it to his chair before her mother chases her out of the room. Then she’ll curl up in his lap, in the flicker of the telly, and later he’ll carry her up to bed.

It’s dark on the landing.

The light on the landing is off. She isn’t scared. She thinks of herself as a ghost. She can spook her parents – she knows this – when they come on her at such moments, barefoot and pale, out of context, moored in some halfway space, the staircase, the hall.

She creeps down, step by step, feeling the carpet on her bare feet, twisting her soles a little with every step, flexing the fibres. She feels invisible, almost, so little noise is she making.

Some nights there are parties. She hears the laughter in little sips when the lounge door opens, when somebody goes to the bathroom. On those nights she avoids the lounge. Instead she makes for the guest bedroom, where the coats cover the bed in a layered pyramid. The women’s are soft, woolly, with collars of fur which give, when you root in their lifelike depths, a womanish sting of perfume. Their silk linings, slippery cool, feel wet against the backs of your fingers. The men’s are sterner, textured tweeds and twills, with the sharp assertive stench of stale tobacco; or crinkly raincoats with belts and buttons. She lies on the bed, among the coats, her hand traversing them like a fish, dipping in and out of flaps and pockets. Her fingers trace train tickets, paper hankies, loose coins, stiff folded banknotes, glasses-cases, bubble-moulded sheets of aspirin. They pat car keys and ballpoint pens and cigarette lighters. Their probing tips brush crumbs and lint and grit in the seams of pockets.

Only once did she take something. A book of matches. The slim glossy packet swelling to its jerky spine, its cover tucked snugly into the jutting lip with its cold smudgy strip where the matches sparked. The embossed logo troubling the ball of her thumb. An object both worthless and exquisite. Who would miss it? She folded her fingers over it, made for the door.

The banister is smooth beneath her palm. She thinks, as ever, about sliding down it, as they do in the movies, as they do in cartoons, as she has never yet done. The paint is thick, smooth; her thumb catches a bubble, a little
runnel
that has dried and hardened, that she feels with her thumb now every night.

She knows every step. The loose stair-rod and then the landing, and then the bend in the stairs, and then the man. A man in a green jacket, standing in the hall. And he must have heard her – maybe she is not so silent after all – because his head turns. At first the flash of his
glasses
is all that she sees but he steps to the side and shades his eyes and she sees him, a man like her father, with brown hair and glasses, but younger. His face is kind, he has a kind face, and she smiles at him, a smile that expects his complicity, a smile that says,
Don’t tell
.

He smiles back, and says something in a voice that is, not foreign, exactly, but guttural, thick – and though she doesn’t catch the words she nods.

Behind him, the front door is ajar. He will let the cold in, she thinks. The man looks at her. She isn’t scared. They often have visitors at this time, Daddy’s clients, men who stand sparely in the hallway till Daddy can see them. When she comes downstairs on these nights, the men grin, almost shy, patting their pockets for coins. When their business is finished and the men leave, she stands by her father’s legs as they say goodnight. But tonight, stalled on the landing, poised to take the last few stairs she hears a noise, there’s a noise from the living room, like furniture being shifted, and a man comes briskly out and the two men are gone.

She wants to call out, to bring the men back, the green man with the nice smile. But though the door is ajar and the night air – cold and sharp, Novemberish – tingles on her ankles, what she smells is the harsh burnt stink from the living room.

She glances into the dark street. For a moment she thinks about leaving, escaping into the night. Already, the bright room at her back is a foreign land. It’s not the living room but a room in a fairy tale, a dragon’s cave. And now, for the first time she can remember, she regrets having left her bed. She can feel the duvet’s warmth, the girl-shaped hollow that she’s left, but there is no way now to get back, to climb backwards up the stairs and into the past. She closes the front door and leans against it, counting to ten.

Her mother is kneeling by the sofa, at the far end of the living room. Is it the rosary? is what the girl thinks: are they saying the rosary? But her mother is beside the sofa, not in front. There is something on the floor; her mother is bending over something. She flitters across but pulls up short. She’s standing in something. Her feet are wet –
sodden
, as though her bladder has emptied – and she flexes her toes, arching them free of the sopping rug. But when she looks down, when her strained toes sink back to the carpet, what rises between them is black, brown, a
cola-coloured
puddle. Without moving her feet she leans right over, canting her body to see beyond the couch, beyond her kneeling mother, to whatever has caused the mess.

And now her bladder does empty, the water loosed in a startling spatter, like radio hiss, the warm turning
speedily
cool on her inner shins.

He looks drunk, he looks like she’s seen him one time at New Year’s, slumped on the couch, pouting and heavy, impervious to her nudges and shunts. Now, though, he lies on the carpet, his head against the wall-unit, his chin forced into his neck. And around him, sustaining him it seems, is a black little lake, a darkling pool. She looks to her mother but her mother is busy, frantic, pushing her dad in the chest, two-handed, once and then again,
serious
thumps that bounce his head against the wood.

‘Get someone!’ her mother is shouting. ‘Get someone!’

The girl turns, too quickly, skidding in the mess, down on one knee and one hand, before righting herself and skittering out. There is sky, stars, branches against the street lights. There is shouting now, clamour, a girl in a bloody nightdress whirling in the roadway, the sound of her shouting and animal cries. And now the doors are opening, lights coming on, stripes of yellow light along the paths.

‘We’re like football players,’ Rix liked to say. ‘Doesn’t matter what we do all week. Just get it right on Saturday.’ He’d trot this out, early shift on Saturdays, out on the floor in his shirtsleeves, and we watched stolidly from our workstations, watched him gesture and pace, before swivelling back to our screens. It was Rix’s shtick,
motivational
crapola, but how wonderful, it struck me now, tracking my screensaver’s tropical fish, how wonderful if this were true. All week to idle in boyish play, and then one bright flurry of achievement. Handshakes and drinks and the stereo loud on the drive home.

The telephone rang. It was Tuesday morning, quarter to twelve. I’d been sat there since eight, cursing in turn every portion of our fledgling legislature, from the ruling coalition to the inoffensive Greens. Conference was at twelve. For an hour I’d been trawling the news sites for stories. Holyrood had been in recess for a week and already the leads had dried up. The MSPs had scattered, gone to ground in Portugal and Cyprus, shielding their eyes from the poolside glare. First Minister William ‘Banker Bill’ MacLaren was taking his annual,
ostentatiously
frugal week on the Isle of Mull. I was sitting it out till my own break began, five days from now, when the boys and I would be heading west; five days’ furlough on Carradale beach. Currently, on a document headed ‘Schedule’, I had four curt lines of text: ‘Post office
closures
’; ‘Knife crime statistics’; ‘Smoking ban challenge’; and ‘Gallup poll: support for Independence spikes’. If each of these stories panned out, I might make a couple of nibs, a wing column. Forget page leads. Forget splash.

I’d spent two fruitless hours trying to raise my
contacts
. Everyone’s email had an out-of-office autoreply promising prompt attention to your message at a
specified
future date, two weeks down the line, and giving a mobile number for urgent enquiries. But the mobiles all rang out and went to voicemail. I pictured them throbbing forlornly on hotel dressers while their owners piloted lilos with swipes of a trailing hand, or coaxed the next
coarse-grained
page with a lotion-free pinkie. By now I was on to the blogs, sifting for dirt.

On the fifth ring I picked up. The click of the newsdesk secretary, putting someone through.

‘Gerry Conway?’

‘Speaking.’

‘Must be a helluva story.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It must be a big story you’re working on, you’re too busy to return your calls.’

‘Who is this?’

‘No time to follow a lead, even when it’s served right up to your desk.’

‘Who is this?’

‘It’s Hamish Neil, Mr Conway.’

He left a pause. I left it too. Finally he sighed, heavily.

‘I phoned you last night? I phoned again this morning. I emailed you.’ He blew out some air. ‘About Peter Lyons?’

His tone had flattened to a petulant bleat.

‘Hamish, is it? OK. Thing is, Hamish, it’s a busy week. I mean, if Lyons is poking his research assistant or taking his R&R in Blythswood Square, it’s not really our thing. Why don’t you try somewhere else? Give the
Record
a call; the number’s on the website.’

The silence had a wounded quality. I could hear his lips working, the tongue detaching itself from his teeth.

‘It’s not your thing?’ He laughed. ‘Is that right? Not your thing. It’s not sex, Mr Conway. It’s better than that. It’s –’ he let the word come to him – ‘it’s a bit
graver
than that.’

‘Graver than sex?’ I snorted. Something in his tone put my back up. ‘Let’s have it then. Amaze me.’

His laboured breathing filled the silence.

‘The thing is,’ he said finally. ‘I’d rather not do this over the phone.’

‘No? I’d have thought you did a lot of this over the phone.’

‘What?’

‘Wanking off. Try the
Record
, Mr Neil. Thanks for your call.’

*

Every day they plagued you. Cranks and timewasters, slanderers and fantasists. Breathless grievance merchants. Whispering grasses. People with the inside dope, the horse’s mouth, on various ministers and mandarins. Rumours and smears and did-you-hear-the-one-about
so-and-so
. They floated this stuff on the blogs, but it wasn’t enough. They needed the validation of a forty-point
headline
, the tangible tarnish of newsprint. Every day I took a dozen of these calls. Statistically, yeah, a portion would fly. Some of them would hold water. But how could you tell? In the absence of evidence you were down to rules of thumb, intuition, the timbre of someone’s voice.

I turned back to the screen but I couldn’t focus. I kept hearing Neil’s flummoxed laugh, the bewilderment in his throat as I pulled the plug on him. At the start of the call his voice was hearty, voluptuous with assurance. He was practically purring. And this is the flip side of smugness: he would hardly have sounded so smug if he didn’t have something good. He had mentioned an email. I opened Eudora and clicked on my inbox.

I scrolled down my messages. Aside from layered swathes of spam, highlighted in tangerine font, my inbox was clogged with comments on last week’s copy. Points of information. Bulletins from interest groups. Obscene rants and sectarian slurs; flamboyant denunciations in wide-eyed capitals. I was harried by madmen. Indignant missives from halfway round the globe. The letters page was no longer enough; now people weren’t happy till they’d made it personal, till they’d helped you to a
perception
, point by pernickety point, of the manifold levels on which your work sucked.

Finally, amid the promises of penis enlargement, offers of Viagra and cheap non-prescription drugs, I spotted it.

I hit ‘delete’ and exited Eudora. Piss or get off the pot, Mr Neil. I clicked on my bookmarked page from Visit Carradale. A hilltop view over Carradale Bay: the great white curve of sand, like the head on a pint of Guinness; the petrol-blue Kilbrannan Sound, and the five jagged peaks of Arran.

*

The House Under the Sea.
There’s a cousin of mine who isn’t quite right. There were complications when Aunt Jude was giving birth. Dunc needed oxygen; someone fucked up and he got it too late. Now his features are a little squashed, and the motion of his limbs is out of true, as if he were moving underwater. He’s a little slow, but mainly what he is is a guy who can’t be mean. As a kid he wouldn’t eat chocolate animals. His action men fraternised in an endless Christmas truce. All he really liked to do was look at fish. He watched nature documentaries. The turquoise screen; the yellow-and-black fish volte-facing smartly; the magical flourish of bubbles; the camera
panning
over ruined groves of coral. These images enthralled him. But when the voiceover started, when the narrative kicked in, he gave up. The words killed his interest. He’d be gawping at a sea-porcupine squirting away from a Moray eel, and then – ‘The house under the sea …’ – and that was it. He’d get up and leave the room. It became a family catchphrase; when something was boring the pants off you, when your attention had started to
wander
, someone would ham the Cousteau accent and
mumble
it into your ear.

It came to me now, as Rix soldiered on through his weekly address. He’d been at it for twenty minutes,
moving
his big hands around on the table like he was shuffling and setting a stack of toy bricks. The words, in his patient estuary whine, seemed to vaporise before they reached our ears, and I watched instead the meaty pale lips, the
quaking
pink cheeks, the bouncing blond wedge of feather-cut fringe. He was only thirty-nine, but he had the girth, the commanding upholstery, of a senior banking executive. When he spread his arms, a tremendous lemon shirt,
tethered
at collar and cuffs, blazed like a local sun.

We’d been through the schedule. Fiona Maguire had spoken to the news list, and I’d kept my gaze lowered while she covered politics – my four paltry offerings – in her sceptical monotone. We’d done features, foreign, sport. Neve McDonald had bestowed her grudging
preview
of the magazine. Rix had rallied the troops. We were nearly done. Before we rose, though, Rix liked to spring a couple of questions on one of his editors, quiz them about recent pieces, plans for the coming weeks. My turn was about due, and I’d prepared some plausible
codswallop
about upcoming party conferences, a possible rift in the coalition, but it wasn’t required.

‘Thomas!’ Rix’s voice was hearty now, his palms flat on the table, ready to lever himself up. ‘What happened, Tam? Three pages of footie. No interviews, no Old Firm transfers. Did your guys take a collective sickie? Was there an outbreak of salmonella that I didn’t hear about?’

Tam Logan’s folded arms slid forward on the desk. He was shaking his head as it slumped to the wood. Logan spent the whole close season with a haunted, guilty look. For the months of June and July he did little else but smoke. When you entered or left the building, there he was, gaunt-cheeked, hunched by the revolving doors, sucking viciously on a B&H. With no
Celtic-and-Rangers
, the paper could drop 5,000. Logan felt
personally
responsible.

He raised his head wearily.

‘Can only pish with the cock I’ve got, Norman. Nothing’s happening. If we’d qualified for bloody Portugal we’d have something, but this is it.’

‘You can’t speculate? Throw some names around. Who’s unhappy at Inter, Real Madrid? They’re always unhappy, aren’t they? Beckham? Adriano? The Old Firm couldn’t be in for these guys? Take a flyer.’

‘They don’t have any money, Norman. It’s not plausible.’

Rix goggled.

‘So make it plausible. Hint at takeovers. New investors. Give me fucking something, Tam. Not endless profiles of diddy teams.’

Logan straightened up, tossed his pen on the table. He had stains on his hands, orange stripes down his fore and middle fingers.

‘Fine. Right.’

Two wet diamonds appeared when he laced his fingers behind his head.

Neve McDonald was sitting across from me, doodling on her schedule. I tried to catch her eye. She wasn’t
especially
good-looking but she had a sulky mouth I found appealing. I wanted to share a look, flick my gaze
smartly
skywards – twinkle, if I could achieve it – to signal my wry detachment from the proceedings. She kept her eyes on her drawing.

Rix rose, his PA scuffling papers into a bundle. There was a ferocious crackling as everyone crumpled their sandwich trays.

*

At my desk I checked my emails and shut down my
computer
. I shared a desk – a cluster of workstations – with the other specialists: energy, health, environment. What else? Education.

Tuesday conference was, for most of the working week, my only commitment. In truth, I didn’t even have to turn up to this, so long as I got my schedule in to Fiona. But I made a point of attending – to keep up with what was happening, and to make sure that my stories (when I had any) got a decent show. After conference, I’d take the afternoon off. A trawl round Borders. Daniel Auteuil at the GFT. Rembrandt’s
Man in Armour
at Kelvingrove. On Wednesday and Thursday I’d be at Holyrood (when Parliament was in session) or working from home (when it wasn’t). It was Friday evening before I’d be back at the office to write my stories. Saturday we put the paper to bed. Sunday and Monday I saw the boys.

I was packing up to go when Martin Moir came along and sat on my desk.

There were four empty chairs – the other specialists had already left, for the back nine at Eaglesham, or a stool in the Cope, or wherever they went on a Tuesday pm. But Moir was always perching on your desk. He shifted his hams as if dropping a fart.

‘Neve said there was a little
frisson
this morning?’

‘Oh aye?’

Moir never went to conference but he liked to know the dirt.

‘It go OK?’

‘Wonderful, Martin. Really first rate.’

‘He’s not the worst, Gerry.’

Moir was touchy about this. A year ago, Rix set up an ‘Investigations Unit’ – three reporters whose brief was to develop major stories and report them in a run of
double-page
spreads. The unit reported directly to Rix, not to Fiona Maguire. Martin Moir headed it up. It made him look like Rix’s golden boy, which is what he was. It wouldn’t have bothered me, but it bothered Moir.

‘He’s actually pretty fair. Once you know him, I mean.’

‘Who is?’

Moir smiled.

‘This is something. It really is.’ He had lifted one of the photos on my desk. The Sinatra. Black and white. Outside Green’s Playhouse in fifty-two. My teenage old man with his arm around Frank’s shoulder; Sinatra
looking
tousled and wry, feigning diffidence but still flashing a killer smile. The old man grinning with manic brightness.

‘He really played in, Paisley was it?’

‘Ayr. He played the Piv in fifty-two. The place was three-quarters empty. He was more or less a nobody at that stage. This was before the comeback.
From Here to Eternity.
All that.’

‘Wow.’

He put the photo down.

‘Hey. The horse’s head in the bed, right?’

‘In the movie, aye.’

Moir put his hands in his pockets, flapped his fingers so that his silver jiggled.

‘Whatever else, Gerry, he did a real job on the
Mail
.’

I reached for my bottle of Volvic.

‘It’s not that bad a paper.’

‘A lot of people buy it,’ I agreed.

Rix had put 10,000 on the
Mail
. When everyone else was in freefall, he’d boosted the
Mail
by 10,000 a day. It made him untouchable. It made him look like a
Tribune
editor, to certain people.