Demo (18 page)

Give him something, Julian. Just give him something.

The old man bowed towards her, kept his rheumy eyes on her face, smiled a little smile. His chin was silver with rough stubble; the drip on his nose quivered. He straightened and turned back to Julian.

And all they would have to do, sir, is pap a few dods a Semtex, tied tay an alarm clock, intay the aforementioned bins and, Bob's your uncle. Central Station blown tay bits. Hunners a casualties.

He moved the cup over the top of her arm and held it an
inch away from Julian's chest. Almost still, but for a slight tremor.

So, there nay bins.

Julian tightened his armpit grip on her hands and they stood like that for what felt like ages, till he smiled and released her. Her fingers tingled.

Here you are, mate. He brought out a pile of coins from deep in the left-hand pocket of his parka, selected a couple and dropped them into the cardboard cup. Did you audition for this role then? he said. Archetypal Glasgow Drunk?

The old man's attention was on Julian's hand, as he returned the remaining coins to his pocket. When he raised his head, the drip was gone, and his eyes looked tired.

No, son. I was born tay it.

They were subdued on the funny little underground train, on the way to Julian's flat. Laetitia still had the papery feel of the old man's farewell handshake on her, saw the look he gave them when he turned to go. She moved her laptop closer to her side on the swirly orange livery of the seat, reached for Julian's hand under the end of his sleeve. It was warm and moist. She laced her fingers through his and he turned to look at her.

Don't worry, babe. It's the Glasgow style. Even the drunks are into politics and philosophy. The whole Rab C. Nesbitt nine yards.
A twenty-four-hour cabaret
, as one of their local writers put it.

On the seat across from them, a young guy was glaring at Julian. He looked about twenty. His hair was cropped with a blond tuft at the front. Like Tintin, she thought. He was holding on to the metal pole and sitting on the edge of his seat.

Julian patted her arm and faced forward again, met the stare of the boy.

What you sayin about Glasgow, ya posh cunt? You don't like it, go back where you came fae.
Glaahs-gey!
It's fuckin Glasgow, man. Glaz-goh! He leant further forward in his seat, jabbed his finger level with Julian's face to punctuate each syllable.

She felt her heart beat faster. Julian tightened his grip of her hand. Around them, passengers were getting up and the train squealed to a stop. Nobody looked at the young guy. Or at them. He pulled himself to his feet by the pole, and made for the door as it slid open.

Fuckin English cunt, he said to the back of an Asian woman getting off in front of him. She pulled a thin green scarf over her head and moved aside to let him out before her.

Laetitia watched him walk towards the exit. The sign on the platform read ‘Cowcaddens'. As he passed, he turned to the train and gave them the finger.

Julian looked at her. His face was white and tense. Wee
Glaz-goh
hard man, he said. I rest my case.

Where do we get off? she asked.

Kelvinbridge.

There was a list of stations on the arched wall by the platform. She craned to scan it. Only two more stops.

Don't worry, pal. We're no all like that.

A guy about their age was perched on one buttock on the seat beyond Julian, facing them, a rolled-up newspaper in the pocket of his jacket, one foot resting on the other knee. An empty drinks can, orange and blue, rolled with the motion of the train from beside his other foot and clattered against the seat opposite. He smiled at her.

I know, man, Julian said. Some of my best friends…

In saying that, you
were
a bit condescending. Rab C.'s well passé, pal. Know what I'm sayin? Doesny do to patronize the good people of Glasgow.

Oh, here we go, Julian said. He was frowning. She had never noticed before how deep the furrow was between his eyes. Perhaps it was more pronounced with his shorn head. It made him look older.

No, I'm just sayin… Piece a free advice, my friend. Simple as that. He took his paper from his pocket, shook it out and started to read.

Julian tensed beside her, ready to engage with the guy. This didn't happen on the London Underground; people rarely made eye contact, wouldn't dream of speaking to other passengers. She squeezed his fingers, pressed herself closer to his side. Those who did were studiously ignored, blocked out by newspapers, averted gazes, assumed to be trouble or mentally ill. She looked out the window. The train was pulling away from St George's Cross platform.

Is the next stop ours? she said.

Julian nodded.

I'll be glad when this journey's over, she whispered into his shoulder. I've had enough of trains for one day.

She didn't realize what Julian was doing at first when he swung her rucksack off his back and fumbled in his pocket in front of a door between a continental grocer and a bookmaker's. It had peeling brown varnish and there were two worn stone steps up to it. She stood on her toes and peered over his shoulder at the square window in the wood. A spider web of cracks ran to the edges from a small round hole just off centre. Beneath this random pattern, she could see that the inside of the glass was marked off with wire into little squares like graph paper. To toughen it, she supposed.

Is this where you live?

Yeah. He turned to her, smiling, and held up a silver Yale key. Welcome to the Palace of Grunge.

What happened to the glass?

Fascist bullet.

No, really, what happened?

Julian jiggled the key in the lock and rattled the door. Fucking useless key, he said, as it gave and the door opened inwards with a strange whine.

Et voilà.
He cast her a grin over his shoulder.
Entrez, madame.

She lifted her laptop case, held it in front of her chest and followed Julian into a dark passageway. It stank of old rubbish.

Landlord still hasn't fixed the close light. Bastard.

What's a close light?

This, my dear, is the close. Julian flourished his free arm into the rank air of the passage. Name for the common entry into tenement buildings. Not the most salubrious specimen, admittedly, this one. Perhaps the landlord is being merciful. No. On second thoughts, revert to original assessment, he's a tight-fisted bastard.

But what
really
happened to the door?

They reached the foot of a wide staircase. Her eyes adjusted to the dim orange glow that made it through the cracked glass from the sodium streetlight outside. And there was some light coming through a window on the landing above, three panes of clear glass and on the others the remains of some kind of painted Victorian scene. She could make out a bird on a branch.

No, a fascist bullet, really. Or so Danny says.

Danny! Danny Kilkenny?

The one and only.

Have you seen much of him?

Certainly. And so will you. He's crashing here for a few days till he can find somewhere else. Fell out with old man Stalin; left because his mother was upset.

Stalin? You mean his father?

Of course.

She was watching where she put her feet on the dark stairs, hugging her laptop to her. On the landing, she stopped. The stink of rubbish was worse here. Close up she could see the painted bird was perched among brown leaves and held a berry in its beak.

But, Julian, why did you let him stay when you knew I was coming?

I didn't. It was Jed.

Jed?

Jed, my flatmate. He and Danny are friends from way back.

Julian stopped and turned to her, hitched her rucksack further onto his back. It was Jed who got Danny into the group. He reached for her hand. Don't worry, Tish. Danny's cool with it. With us.

He looked like a little boy, eyes wide, wonky smile, except for the orange light that hollowed out the planes of his face, and the frown line that might now be permanent.

You've spoken to him?

No-o-o… not exactly. Look, he's fine.
All shall be well, and all shall be well…
He lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed it. His lips were moist and nuzzled for a moment in her palm, like a pet. Or a childhood secret. He raised his eyes to her
… and all manner of thing shall be well
.

Clare's not here too, is she?

No, darling. Clare is still in parental custody. When she's not at St Veronica's –
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and at the hour of our death
– learning how to be a good little Catholic girl.

Julian! You screwed her, remember. But she couldn't help smiling in the dark.

There was no one there when they entered the flat. No Jed.
No Danny. She breathed again. She had time to take it in, get her bearings before she had to deal with that.

Oh, my God!

You should have been an estate agent, she said to Julian. This was not how she imagined it from his e-mails, waxing lyrical about high ceilings, wedding cake cornicing, the big bay window. When he switched on the shadeless light, it was the sheer scale of the mess that staggered her. Clothes, books, CDs, newspapers, pizza boxes, plates, mugs, glasses, ashtrays, takeaway cartons covered the floor. A sea of detritus. Julian waded in, kicking rubbish aside, clearing a path to the window, inviting her to follow in his wake.

The window,
the beautiful bay window
, was curtainless at one side; sagging over the other was what looked like an old banner, drained of colour by the orange sodium lights outside.

This is even worse than your room in Cambridge. If that's possible. She pressed her laptop closer to her and took a few steps into the room. Her foot caught a polystyrene cup and it wedged on like a toecap. She kicked the air three times before it flew off.

It's not my room; it's the living room, he said. Danny's going to be sleeping here for the mo.

Where? she said. She could see no surface that resembled a bed. It was like a building worked over by a hurricane, transformed by a bomb; no recognizable feature remained.

Sofa bed. There. He pointed to a mound in the middle of the room, where she spotted a filthy bundled duvet underneath a top layer of clothes and papers.

Fucking hell, Julian.

Now don't go all bourgeois and little-womanish on me, he said. Housework and the revolution are incompatible.

Bullshit, she said. Bee Fucking Ess.

He laughed. Attagirl. You're right. Jed and I and Malcolm,
the ex-tenant – Malcolm X, we call him – used to argue so much about who should do what, we gave up on it. Julian set her rucksack on top of a pile of clothes. She fixed its coordinates in her head in case it disappeared amongst the rubble

Malcolm nearly killed Jed one night for not washing the dishes when it was his turn. Hit him over the head with the kettle which, luckily, had not yet been boiled. Left a scar above his left eye, though. Drenched us all when the lid flew off. After that, we held a summit and agreed we'd each just do housework when we felt like it. He reached out to Laetitia. Here, let me take your coat.

She shook her head. In a minute.

And of course –
quelle surprise!
– no one ever felt like it. Malcolm couldn't hack it. Moved out not long after. Bit of an old woman, our Malcolm.

Julian, I don't think I can do this. I'll never get any work done here. She could feel the pricking in her nose, the loosening of mucus, the start of tears. She blinked, sniffed, stopped herself.

Babe! It's not as bad as all that. He held her shoulders and fixed her eyes with his, blue again now in the bald light, the tiny gold hairs on his head like so many live filaments. Hey, Tish, it's only
things
; they don't matter. And my room's much better.
Our
room. Come on, I'll show you.

She wouldn't release one arm from its grip on her laptop to take his outstretched hand. But she followed him as he picked his way back across the room to the door. The hall was too dark to see much, and for that she was grateful. She stayed close to him as he crossed it to open one of the other doors.

In the dark, in the dark.
She lay there on her side, trying to make out the noises in the flat. Julian was curled into her back, asleep. His breath fanned her hair; it rose and settled, rose and
settled, feathering her cheek. They were on the top floor, so what sounded like footsteps above must be something else. She'd woken up briefly when she heard voices and banging, then slept again. Till now. Now she was awake for the night, for however much of it was left. She couldn't extricate her watch arm from where Julian had it pinned to her thigh. It was too dark anyway to make it out.

He'd been right about his room. It was do-able. Before she arrived, he'd clearly made an effort. The bed was graced with an entirely new set of bedding bought earlier in the day. New thick duvet, new fat pillows, new cover, sheet and pillowslips in white cotton. A bridal bed. The rest of the room was straining to be minimal: a desk with his computer on it; a bulging blue canvas wardrobe, zipped up; one chaotic bookcase, stuffed and overflowing with papers, books, plastic wallets of notes; two straight-backed wooden chairs, painted blue, one on either side of the bed. What couldn't be contained had probably been tipped into the living room.

A sly move, to show her the other room first. Anything would have to be an improvement. She smiled in the dark, remembering. The kiss at the foot of the bed, tender, slightly tremulous. As if it was their first time.
Do as you would be done by
, she thought, the white bed gleaming beside them, even when she closed her eyes. It was possible to shut out the rubbish piled next door.
Sail off on a river of crystal light…
Children's rhymes were saying themselves in her head
… into a sea of blue
. Fragments alighting like butterflies. Where did they spring from? She didn't say them aloud.
Where are you going and what do you wish, the old moon asked the three?…
Julian would be forced to scoff, tell her it was mawkish crap.
We have come to fish for the herring fish …
Or treat her like a child
… that live in this beautiful sea
. Prozac. Could this be a side effect? A portal into all the sentimental literature she'd
read as a child? It's only supposed to kick in after three weeks, the doctor said. She didn't care. When he finally came into her under the white cover with its folds from the packaging still crisp, it was as if she had come home.