One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night (10 page)

He had taken the charter coach rather than hire a car because it brought forward the point of no return. Either way, he knew he’d spend most of the journey asking himself why he was making it, but only one option allowed him to pull into a lay‐
by, swing around and head back the way he’d come.

So why was he making this journey? What did he want from these people, who he’d only known as children, however old fifteen might once have felt?

His favourite of his paintings shared its name with the intended title of his autobiography.

Seek No Absolution.

It was his lesson to himself, a code by which he had learned to live. It was his penance and his protector. His pain and his strength.

‘I came from the same background as Davie Murdoch, the same kind of council scheme, and I never turned out like that. So don’t talk to me about poverty or about deprivation, because that’s nothing to do with it.’

A thousand people, a thousand quotes, a thousand tabloids. And know what? They were all right. It was nothing to do with money, or class, or streets, or schemes. He knew that. Always had. It wouldn’t have mattered whether he’d grown up in a council house in Auchenlea or a mansion in Newton Mearns, Davie Murdoch would have turned out exactly the same – long as you didn’t take his parents out of the equation, anyway. Well, actually, perhaps that was unrealistic: if his father was working in a position remunerative enough to pay that Newton Mearns mortgage, he probably wouldn’t have had quite so many spare hours to drink all that El‐
D. Quality time with his family would have been at more of a premium, too. Far fewer memorable evenings together, by the fire, or round the dinner table, or down at Accident & Emergency.

Killing the budgie stood out. He didn’t know why – maybe because it only happened the once and most of his da’s other party tricks happened on a regular basis. Maybe it was the absurdity. It sounds quite funny, almost. Budgies
are
funny. Daft wee things. Mr McCrae in number 24 bred them, gave Davie one for his seventh birthday, plus an old cage. Davie spilled a glass of Alpine cola over his da’s fags that night, after the shop had shut as well. Joseph Murdoch esquire wasn’t best pleased, and felt his son needed to be taught a lesson about the irreplaceability of certain fragile things.

He clapped his hands together hard on the wee green bird and dropped it on the coffee table, where it twitched for a while, then lay still. After that his da battered him ‘for greetin’ aboot a stupit fuckin’ wee spyug’.

Ah, the memories. You couldn’t buy stuff like that.

There had been a squalid inevitability about his da ending up dead in a gutter with bootprints all over him. When Davie was informed of it in prison, he’d wanted to meet whoever it was and shake his hand. That lasted the second and a half it took to realise that the bloke would only be another angry and sadistic wee cunt, with another vodka‐
and‐
Valium‐
blitzed wife and another junior protégé learning violence as his only means of expression.

‘My father was a violent alcoholic too, and I never turned out that way.’

Good for you, pal. Good for you.

Seek no absolution. Offer no excuses.

He would not present his childhood as mitigation, only context. Your environment might help make you who you
are
, but what you
do
is all your own work. He knew who he was and he knew what he had done. He knew also that he could undo none of it. So though every day he repented, he never asked forgiveness. Forgiveness, if successfully solicited, seemed a thing not earned but cheaply bought, and that from the goodwill of the wronged, to whom the cost was far greater.

All of which was, of course, just as well and by the by, because there was never likely to be much forgiveness going round – not while Scotland’s moral arbiters remained the
Daily Record
and the
Sun
. Forgiveness is not a front‐
page lead. It’s a slow‐
day inside feature at best. According to the tabloids, Davie Murdoch had gone from hard‐
man to con‐
man, convict to con‐
merchant, pulling the wool over the eyes of whatever gullible liberals in the penal regime saw fit to parole him. Guys like that don’t change, they just learn to play the system.

Well, maybe that was true. If the system involved not hurting anybody anymore, trying exhaustively to understand yourself and striving to make some kind of amends, then sure, he’d like to think he’d learned to play it. But had he changed?

Everybody changes, according to the sage Eddie Milton, two seats back.

Certainly, he’d ‘put his past behind him’. He now had a life that at fifteen he wouldn’t even have had the imagination to aspire to. His wife, Collette, his greatest, closest friend, was a Yale‐
educated, New England blue‐
blood. Theatre directors came to dinner. Galleries exhibited his paintings, which hadn’t made as much of a splash or as much money as was reported back home, but they
were
his work, and he had enjoyed the satisfaction of reading New York critics argue over them in glossy magazines. And beckoning him towards a bright and loving future were the three kids who were so much the children of his new world that they didn’t even talk like him.

The trouble with putting your past behind you, however, is that sometimes you can feel like you
have
no past. Collette understood that, the way Collette understood everything, belying as she always did the notion that an absence of adversity in your life was any impediment to either wisdom or empathy. She knew that a past so filled with mistakes and regrets can be overcome, but can’t be erased. His might be a shitey past, but it was the only past he had, and no matter how he tried, he couldn’t get by without one.

St Michael’s held a special status for him. He had gone from secondary school to incarceration with very little in the way of ‘normal’ life intervening, so his schooldays were the closest he’d come to living as part of a functioning society, closed and microcosmic though it was. Consequently, his recollections of this period seemed not only more vivid but more poignant than of any other time. Memories of petty playground thuggery elicited deeper shame than of certain later, greater brutalities, and it was only recently that he’d appreciated the simple reason why: at school, he
liked
the people he was hurting.

He never knew that at the time; all he knew was anger. Anger at their laughter, at their friendships, at their achievements, at their boasts, or anger at their posturings, at their aspirations, at their trivialities … but mainly anger because he didn’t know how to be part of them, one of them. Their friend.

He liked those people. It felt like a revelation when at last he articulated this to himself, but it had been staring him in the face for years. For years he’d often found himself wondering what became of them: who they married, what jobs they’d found, whether they had kids, what expenences they’d known, where in this wide world they might have wound up. Matt Black was the only one he knew anything about. Davie had all his CDs and videos, had even gone to see him at a club in New York (although he’d sat at the back and quite definitely didn’t introduce himself after the show).

So when the invitation arrived, it appeared to offer some kind of possibility; he wasn’t quite sure what. ‘Closure,’ Collette suggested, invoking the American term for tying up such psychological loose ends. It was presumably their record of mauling and disfiguring the English language that made them feel they had nothing to lose when it came to conveying things other cultures had written off as inexpressible in words. The results were seldom elegant, but you always knew what they were getting at. However, in this case closure seemed wrong: to him this was more about openings, beginnings.

Seek no absolution.

He couldn’t change who he’d been, what he’d done. He didn’t want to ask their forgiveness. He just wanted to know them again.

He watched the road go by, listened to the chat around him. Familiar names were mentioned, incidents recalled, characters reassassinated, old jokes revisited. He wasn’t ready yet, but he would be. By the time they got to their destination, he definitely would be.

There was only one wee thing still bothering him.

In common with both Eddie and Charlie, the name Gavin Hutchison meant absolutely nothing to him.

Simone Hutchison knew that nothing made a party memorable quite so much as a surprise. Her husband, Gavin, had of late devoted almost all of his spare time and energy towards making that evening’s soirée the biggest social event of his life, so she felt it was the least she could do to match that with the biggest surprise of his life. She estimated that standing up before the assembled throng and announcing she was leaving him should probably do the trick. At the very least, it would be a honey of an ice‐
breaker.

The key word was ‘almost’. Almost all his spare time, almost all his spare energy, almost all his spare cash. Almost. As in not absolutely. As in still leaving enough of all three to send his dick on frequent fact‐
finding trips to foreign genitals.

She wasn’t leaving him because of the affair; she hadn’t left him over any of the previous ones, and although this one was simply overflowing with signposts and significance, when it came down to the fundamentals there was nothing new to get especially upset about. The betrayal and the humiliation might have seemed unusually poignant, given the latest away‐
day fuck’s identity, if Simone hadn’t recognised them as a mere pastiche of the greater betrayal and humiliation that characterised her entire marriage.

That was why she had been biding her time, waiting for tonight instead of confronting him with it weeks back: not just because it would be embarrassingly public, but because the occasion represented everything that was wrong with Gavin, and there could be no more appropriate moment to serve up his balls on a plate.

He’d been like a kid on Christmas Eve all the way up the road, so uncontainably jumpy with anticipation that she’d feared he might wet the car seat if they drove over a bump. Ordinarily, she’d have found it pathetic, but she lapped it up that morning, entertained by the knowledge that the more inflated he got, the bigger the bang when she burst his bubble. He thought the reunion would be his triumph. He was wrong.

It would be her revenge.

He had, typically, no inkling that his daft‐
but‐
sweet wee wife could be harbouring any mischief. With him driving (of course), she had control of the Lexus’s stereo, and he’d failed, for instance, to detect any significance to her repeating the same track several times as they journeyed north, other than to ask whether there was something wrong with the CD player. It was a Ben Folds Five song, a typically rinky‐
dinky number entitled ‘One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces’, about a guy who was bullied at school coming back to lord it over his former classmates, now that he’s grown up and become a success. The parallel escaped Gavin, but then he seldom paid much attention to Simone’s music purchases anyway, frequently opining that if a record wasn’t available at Tesco’s, then there was probably a damn good reason. The same consumer principles had also lined his bookshelves with the complete works of Clancy, Grisham and Archer.

They parked at the Kilbokie Liftings Jetty and travelled the half‐
mile or so out to the Floating Jobbie by powerlaunch, several of which would ordinarily be shuttling back and forth while construction work was underway. Refurbishment activities were now suspended at weekends, Delta Leisure having found the overtime outlay to be the only thing more expensive than the interest payments. This meant that all the boats were at Gavin’s disposal, but he had instead sprung for a helicopter charter to take the guests out to the platform that afternoon. This was presumably in accordance with the philosophy that ostentation was its own reward, even – maybe especially – when you’re skint.

‘Darling, would you mind taking the gear up to our suite?’ Gavin said, stepping out of the elevator and handing her the overnight bag. ‘I’d better make my presence visible to the staff, check on a couple of things. And maybe you should give your mother a call, make sure the twins are all right.’

‘I shouldn’t imagine anything fatal’s happened to them in the five hours since I last saw them, dear.’

‘Indulge me, darling,’ he added, giving her a peck on the cheek and a thin smile, ostensibly a gesture of affection but translating in the language of their marriage to ‘Fuck off out of my face, can’t you see I’m busy?’

Indulge him. Indulge what? Gavin could often go a fortnight at a time without seeing Rachel and Patricia; one morning was hardly going to leave him wounded by their absence. The true intention of his remark was to restate (once more) that
she
ought to be with them. This was less motivated by any fears over her mother’s child‐
care competence than by Gavin’s never explicitly spoken – but nonetheless bluntly obvious – desire that Simone shouldn’t be at the party tonight.

Not that he wasn’t concerned for his daughters’ welfare. He loved them and treasured them, undoubtedly far more than any of the material accoutrements his success had garnered. However, he didn’t love them
differently
from those material accoutrements: he wanted to take them out and admire them – even play with them – while the mood took him, but once he was finished, he wanted to put them back in their boxes again and play with something else.

His wife was the box‐
keeper.

Simone watched him skip off towards the administration suites, impatient to start pushing the buttons and flicking the switches on his latest, biggest toy. She picked up the overnight bag and began walking towards the Laguna Hotel, the most luxurious of the accommodation blocks and so far the first to have its furnishing and decoration completed. She took the most direct route, using the ornate footbridges to cross the network of water‐
channels, islets and cascades that fed in and out of the largest of the resort’s swimming pools. A breath of wind found its way between the buildings and the screens, the briefest smell of salt a welcome natural intruder amid the interchanging wafts of chlorine, fresh paint and gypsum.