I remembered a joke about Kissinger (‘no; fucking her.’) and found myself listening to Gav and Janice. They were still at that stage of their coital symphony where only the brass section was engaged, as the old metal bed creaked to and fro. The wind section - essentially vox humana - would join in later. I shook my head and bent back to my work, but every now and again, as I was writing or just thinking, a niggling little side-track thought would distract me, and I’d find myself remembering Janice’s words, and wondering what exactly Uncle Rory might have hidden within his later work (if he really had hidden anything). Not, of course, that there was much point in me wondering about it.
For about the hundredth time, I cursed whatever kleptomaniac curmudgeon had walked off the train with my bag. May the scarf unravel and do an Isadora Duncan on the wretch.
‘Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh!’ came faintly from what had been my bedroom. I ground my teeth.
‘Married?’ I gasped, aghast.
‘Well, they’re talking about it,’ my mother said, dipping her head towards the table and holding her Paisley-pattern scarf to her throat as she nibbled tentatively at a large cream cake.
We were in Mrs Mackintosh’s Tea Roomes, just off West Nile Street, surrounded by straightly pendulous light fitments, graph-paper pierced wooden screens, and ladder-back seats which turned my usual procedure of hanging my coat or jacket on the rear of the seat into an operation that resembled hoisting a flag up a tall mast.
‘But they can’t!’ I said. I could feel the blood draining from my face. They couldn’t do this to me!
My mother, neat and slim as ever, ploughed crunchingly into the loaf-sized meringue cream cake like a polar bear breaking into a seal’s den. She gave a tiny giggle as a little dollop of cream adhered to the tip of her nose; she removed it with one finger, licked the pinky, then wiped her nose with her napkin, glancing round the restaurant through the confusing topography of slats and uprights of the seats and screens, apparently worried that this minor lapse in hand-mouth coordination was being critically observed by any of the surrounding middle-class matrons, perhaps with a view to passing on the scandalous morsel to their opposite numbers in Gallanach and having mother black-balled from the local bridge club. She needn’t have worried; from what I had seen, getting a little bit of cream on your nose was practically compulsory, like getting nicked on the cheek in a ritualised duel before being allowed to enter a Prussian drinking sodality. The atmosphere of middle-aged ladies enjoying something wicked and nostalgic was quite palpable.
‘Don’t be silly, Prentice; of course they can. They’re both adults.’ Mother licked cream from the ice-cave interior of the meringue, then broke off part of the superstructure with her fingers and popped it into her mouth.
I shook my head, appalled. Lewis and Verity! Married? No!
‘But isn’t this ...’ My voice had risen a good half-octave and my hands were waggling around on the end of my arms as though I was trying to shake off bits of Sellotape. ‘... rather soon?’ I finished, lamely.
‘Well, yes,’ mum said, sipping her cappuccino. ‘It is.’ She smiled brightly. ‘I mean, not that she’s pregnant or anything, but -’
‘Pregnant!’ I screeched. The very idea! The thought of the two of them fucking was bad enough; Lewis impregnating that gorgeous creature was infinitely worse.
‘Prentice!’ Mother whispered urgently, leaning closer and glancing round again. This time we were getting a few funny looks from other customers. My mother smiled insincerely at a couple of Burberried biddies smirking from the table across the aisle; they turned sniffily away.
My mother giggled again, hand to mouth, then delved into the meringue. She sat back, munching, face red but eyes twinkling, and with those eyes indicated the two women who’d been looking at us; then she raised one finger and pointed first at me, then at her. Her giggle turned into a snort. I rolled my eyes. She dabbed at hers with a clean corner of napkin, laughing.
‘Mother, this is not funny.’ I drank my tea, and attacked another chocolate eclair. It was my fourth and my belly was still growling. ‘Not
at all
funny.’ I knew I was sounding prissy and ridiculous but I couldn’t help it. This was a very trying time for me, and the people who ought to be offering support were offering only insults.
‘Well,’ mother said, sipping at her coffee again. ‘Like I say, there’s no question of that. I mean, not that it makes much difference these days anyway, but yes, you’re right; it is a bit soon. Your father and I have talked to Lewis and he’s said they aren’t going to actually rush into anything, but they just feel so ... right together that it’s ... just come up, you know? Arisen naturally between them.’
I couldn’t help it. My obsessed, starveling brain was conjuring up all sorts of ghastly images to accompany this sort of talk; things arising, coming up ... Oh God ...
‘They’ve talked about it,’ mother said, in tones of utmost reason, with a small shrug. ‘And I just thought you ought to know.’
‘Oh, thanks,’ I said, sarcastically. I felt like I’d been kicked by a camel but I still needed food, so I polished off the eclair, belched with all the decorum I could, and started eyeing up a Danish pastry.
‘They’re in the States right now,’ mother said, licking her fingers. ‘For all we know they might come back married. At least if that happens it won’t come as quite such a shock now, will it?’
‘No,’ I said miserably, and took the pastry. It tasted like sweetened cardboard.
It was April. I hadn’t been back to Gallanach yet this year, hadn’t spoken to dad. My studies weren’t going so well; a 2.2 was probably the best I could hope for. Money was a problem because I’d spent all the dosh I’d got for the car, and I needed my grant to pay off the overdraft I’d built up. There was about a grand in the old account - my dad’s money came by standing order - but I wouldn’t use it, and what I regarded as my own finances were - judging from the tone of the bank’s increasingly frequent letters - somewhere in the deep infrared and in serious danger of vanishing from the electromagnetic spectrum altogether.
I had paid my rent early on with the last inelastic cheque I’d written, hadn’t paid my Poll Tax, had tried to find bar work but been unsuccessful, and was borrowing off Norris, Gav and a few other pals to buy food, which comprised mostly bread and beans and the odd black pudding supper, plus a cider or two when I could be persuaded to squander my meagre resources on contributing to the funds required for a raid on the local off-licence.
I spent a lot of time lying on the couch in the living room, watching day-time television with a sneer on my face and my books on my lap, making snide remarks at the soaps and quizzes, chat shows and audience participation fora, skimming the scummy surface of our effervescent present in preference to plumbing the adumbrate depths of the underlying past. I had taken to finishing off the flat beer left in cans by the members of Norris’s itinerant card school after its frequent visits
chez nous,
and was seriously considering starting to steal from bookshops in an attempt to raise some cash.
For a while I had been ringing the Lost Property office at Queen Street station each week, still pathetically hoping that the bag with Uncle Rory’s poems and Darren Watt’s Möbius scarf would somehow miraculously turn up again. But even they weren’t having anything to do with me any more, after I’d
definitely
detected an edge of sarcasm in the person’s voice and lost my temper and started shouting and swearing.
Rejected by Lost Property; it seemed like the ultimate insult.
And Aunt Janice never did remember any more about whatever Rory had hidden in his later work.
Mum sipped her coffee. I tore the Danish to bits, imagining it was Lewis’s flesh. Or Verity’s underclothes - I was a little confused at the time.
Well, let them get married. The earlier the better; it would end in tears. Let them rush into it, let them repent at leisure. They weren’t right for each other and maybe a marriage would last a shorter time than a more informal, less intense liaison; brief and bitter, both of them on proximity fuses with things coming rapidly to a crunch, rather than something more drawn out, where they might spend long periods apart and so forget how much they hated being together, and enjoy the fleeting, passionate moments of reunion ...
I fumed and bittered away while my mother finished her coffee and made concerned remarks about how thin and pale I was looking. I ate another Danish; mother told me everybody else was fine, back home.
‘Come back, Prentice,’ she said, putting one hand out across the table to me. Her brown eyes looked hurt. ‘This weekend, come back and stay with us. Your father misses you terribly. He’s too proud to -’
‘I can’t,’ I said, pulling my hand away from hers, shaking my head. ‘I need to work this weekend. Got a lot to do. Finals coming up.’
‘Prentice,’ my mother whispered. I was looking down at my plate, licking my finger and picking off the last few crumbs, transferring them to my mouth. I could tell mum was leaning forward, trying to get me to meet her eyes, but I just frowned, and with my moistened finger-tip cleared my plate. ‘Prentice; please. For me, if not for your dad.’
I looked up at her for a moment. I blinked quickly. ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘I don’t know. Let me think about it.’
‘Prentice,’ my mother said quietly, ‘say you will.’
‘All right,’ I said, not looking at her. I knew I was lying but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I couldn’t send her away thinking I could be so heartless and horrible, but I also knew that I wasn’t going to go home that weekend; I’d find an excuse. It wasn’t that this dispute between my dad and me about whether there was a God or not really meant anything any more, but rather the fact of the history of the dispute - the reality of its course, not the substance of the original disagreement - was what prevented me from ending it. It was less that I was too proud, more that I was too embarrassed.
‘You promise?’ mother said, a slight stitching of her brows as she sat back in the ladder-backed seat the only indication that she might not entirely believe me.
‘I promise,’ I nodded. I felt, wretchedly, that I was such a moral coward, such a sickening liar, that making a promise I knew I had no intention whatever of keeping was hardly any worse than what I had already done. ‘I promise,’ I repeated, blinking again, and set my mouth in a firm, determined way. Let there be no way out of it; let me really
make
this promise. I was so disgusted with myself that I wanted to make myself suffer even more when I did - as I knew I would - break my word. I nodded fiercely and smiled bravely, utterly insincerely, at my mother. ‘I really do promise. Really.’
We said goodbye outside, in the street. I told her the flat was in too disgusting a state for her to come and visit. She hoisted her umbrella to ward off the light drizzle that had started to fall, gave me a couple of twenty-pound notes, said she’d look forward to seeing me on Friday, kissed my cheek, then went off to do her shopping.
I had dressed as well as I could that morning, in more or less the same stuff I’d worn for Grandma Margot’s funeral. Minus the lost Möbius scarf, of course. I turned up the collar of my fake biker’s jacket and walked off.
I gave the money to a thankfully dumb-struck fiddle-player on Sauchiehall Street and walked away feeling like some sort of martyred saint. As I walked, this mood was gradually but smoothly replaced by one of utmost depression, while my body - as though jealous of all the obsessive regard my emotions were receiving - came up with its own demands for attention, evidenced by an unsteady, fluid shifting in my guts, and a cold sweat on my brow.
I felt fainter and fainter and worse and worse and more and more nauseous, unsure whether it was the bitterness of sibling-thwarted love, or just too much starch and refined sugar. It felt like my stomach had decided to take a sabbatical; all that food was just sitting there, unprocessed, locked in, slopping around and making me feel horrible.
After a while I stopped telling myself I wasn’t going to be sick, and - resigned to the fact that I was going to have to throw up at some point - kept telling myself instead that I’d manage to hold it in until I was back in the flat, and so do it in private, rather than into the gutter in front of people.
Eventually I threw up into a litter bin attached to a crowded bus shelter on St George’s Road.
I was still gagging up the last few dregs when somebody punched me on the cheek, sending the other side of my head banging against the metal wall of the shelter. I spun round and sat down on the pavement, a ringing noise in my head.
A tramp dressed in tattered, shiny trousers and a couple of greasy-looking, buttonless coats bent down, looking at me. He smelled of last year’s sweat. He gestured angrily up at the litter bin. ‘Ye wee basturt; there might a been somethin good in there!’ He shook his head in obvious disgust and stalked off, muttering.
I got to my feet, supporting myself on the side of the shelter. A wee grey woman wearing a headscarf peered out at me from the end of the bus queue. ‘You all right, sonny?’ she said.
‘Aye,’ I said, grimacing. ‘Missus,’ I added, because it seemed appropriate. I nodded at the bin. ‘Sorry about that; my stomach’s on strike and my food’s coming out in sympathy.’
She smiled uncomprehendingly at me, looking round. ‘Here’s ma bus son; you look after yoursel, okay?’
I felt the side of my head where it had hit the bus shelter; a bruise was forming and my eye felt sore. The wee woman got on her bus and went away.
‘Oh, Prentice!’ Ash said, more in despair than with disgust. ‘You’re kidding.’ She looked at me in the candle-light. I was past caring about feeling guilt and shame and everything was collapsing anyway, so I just looked straight back at her, resigned, and after a while I shook my head. Then I picked up a bit of naan bread and mopped up my curry sauce.