One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night (7 page)

He used to be such a sweet thing …

Matt slowly circumnavigated the place: walkways, doorways, playgrounds, grass bankings, kitchen bins, railings, stairs, windows. The initial standard impression of everything being smaller than he remembered wore off as each square foot yielded up a long‐
stored recollection. To anyone else the walls might look like plain brickwork, but in Matt’s eyes they were lined with brass plaques:

And so on. Until:

That one would have a more specific date, ingrained as it was on everyone’s memories: Saturday, March 24
^th
, 1984. It was the last day Davie Murdoch set foot inside St Michael’s, and the last day Deek Patterson set foot at all without someone else’s assistance, confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

Davie Murdoch. Or Davie Fuckin’ Murdoch, as it probably read on the bastard’s birth certificate. Sociopath, psychopath, whatever you like. Matt had always preferred bampot. Not
a
bampot but
the
bampot; the absolute quintessence of bampottery. The more technical diagnostic terms had always seemed too sophisticated for describing a creature who was, uncomplicatedly, a violence‐
dispenser: an inexhaustible fount of rage, like some abominable force of nature striking out arbitrarily and impersonally at anything in its path. There was no cause and effect with Davie, no way of predicting what would set him off; and consequently no course of action guaranteed to keep you safe. As far as appeasement went, from Matt’s memory, copious bleeding usually did the trick.

The familiar comedian’s story, ‘I was a little guy at school so I developed the ability to make the bigger guys laugh as a form of self‐
defence’, didn’t really apply either, not in a part of the world where the phrase ‘You ’hink you’re a smart cunt, daen’t ye?’ carried such portent. When Matt had his exterior respiratory outlets rearranged through their rapid application to a sturdy length of aluminium, it was because he had raised his own profile sufficiently to be singled out the next time Dilithium Davie’s main reactor blew. Matt had been, he would admit, grandstanding a wee bit, giving it plenty of
esprit de l’escalier
with some classmates after a double Maths period. The lesson had been overseen by the aneurism‐
burstingly tedious Mr Jones, a man so reliant upon cliché for communication that his joining the teaching profession was an enormous loss to ITN.

‘“I’m not doing this for the good of my health,”’ Matt had mimicked, then added his own imaginary reply: ‘Aye you are, because it pays the mortgage, feeds you and keeps you in mingin’ cardigans.’ ‘It’s no skin off my nose whether you get your exams or not.’ ‘Well, that’s not strictly true, is it, sir? Because if nobody in the class passes, there’s bound to be one or two questions asked about your teaching abilities.’

Smart‐
arsed wee wank. Maybe he’d deserved a doing. Whatever, Davie M had shown him his version of the spirit of the staircase soon after. Why? Ha!

Davie Fuckin’ Murdoch. Dilithium Davie. DM and his DMs.

‘Mad Dog Murdoch’ the tabloids had called him, straining their imaginative capacities to come up with a hackneyed moniker that no‐
one had previously referred to the bloke by in his life. (And therein lay another grudge Matt held against him: the bastard had notched up more press in his time than
he
had.)

Upon incarceration, Davie gradually developed into a model prisoner. Unfortunately, his model appeared to have been Jimmy Boyle. His record of violence involving screws and fellow inmates earned him years more time, widespread notoriety, a slew of vilifying headlines, and ultimately a place in the Barlinnie Special Unit. This last was a unique penal innovation that seemed to function by sheer force of paradox, as it seemed hard to think of a crazier idea than taking the most violent men in Scotland and giving them chisels, craft knives and flammable liquids.

The tabloids might have seethed with condemnation of his previous conduct, but it was the sin he committed in there for which they would never forgive him: he reformed. Took the Jimmy Boyle thing the whole way: discovery of artistic talent, Gandhi‐
grade renunciation of violence, marriage to award‐
winning American documentary‐
maker who’d been allowed access to the Bar‐
L to make a film for PBS. Far as Matt had read, he now lived with the wife and weans in New York state, his paintings paying the bills and keeping them in society invites while he spent his days working at some sort of parolees’ outreach centre.

In spite of all his professed liberal sentiments, some small part of Matt – possibly an artificial part, like where the rest of a shattered tooth used to be – had always resented how the guy’s life worked out. Today, though, outside that school, things were looking a little different. Previously, he thought he’d never believed in redemption; now he was wondering whether he’d just never needed to.

Besides, Davie Murdoch might have banjoed him, but it had only been the once. There were those at St Michael’s who’d blighted Matt for months at a time, and he hadn’t borne
them
a grudge. However, this was mainly because they’d been utterly oblivious of the havoc they were wreaking through their thoughtless and irresponsible acts, such as walking along a corridor, asking what you’d put for question four, or sitting within perfume‐
breathing range.

Simone Draper. Lisa McKenzie. Eileen Stewart. He was surprised at the ease with which he could recall their names and faces, given that they’d lain buried in some disused memory repository for a decade and a half. Presumably his current location had a lot to do with that, compensating for the rust of time and the ravages of dedicated substance abuse. Looking through the windows into the unlit and empty rows of desks, he could still see them in their school uniforms; or Christ, worse, the gear they wore at exam time when the dress code was relaxed. He remembered Eileen Stewart in a Simple Minds t-shirt outside O-grade English Paper One, a sight enough to make him consider reassessing the band’s worth (the effect lasting until he gave his borrowed copy of
New Gold Dream
another spin that night and concluded that they were, in fact, still pish). Lisa McKenzie’s flat‐
but‐
nonetheless‐
beguiling chest advertising
Combat Rock
, thus rendering her even more impossibly perfect. Simone Draper wearing, well, anything at all.

Matt never tortured himself by fixating upon the truly unattainable class (and classic) knock‐
outs, the ones everybody else was fantasising about night after night. Not for him the Catherine O’Rourkes, the Annette Strachans. He suffered the far more excruciating affliction of precipitous, unheralded infatuation with girls no‐
one seemed to have previously paid much attention to (including himself), his eyes suddenly opened to traits and beauties he’d apparently been too blind to see before.

Simone was the absolute worst. She must have been in various of his classes for years without drawing his notice, then one Sunday evening he and some pals watched
Fast Times At Ridgemont High
on video in Allan Crossland’s bedroom, less attracted by the prospect of digesting the young Cameron Crowe’s insightful observation of American teen mores than the chance that there might be some tits in it. Matt fell asleep that night utterly captivated by thoughts and images of Jennifer Jason Leigh, and by Monday morning she had turned into Simone Draper. The two of them were never going to confuse anyone in a line‐
up, but this wasn’t a rational matter. Something about one clearly reminded him of the other, and within a day or so he couldn’t be sure which way it swung: whether he’d actually gone gaga over JJL in the first place because subconsciously he had already fallen for Simone.

And, of course, the worst of it was that there was no chance whatsoever of him doing anything about it. He was still a good few years away from the review that would describe him as ‘instilling the room with a presence that wavers precariously between hitman cool and psycho‐
killer chilling’. At that age, he had all the physical presence and coordination of a baby giraffe; and besides, Auchenlea was hardly the environment for teen dreams to come true. It was far easier in the movies. For a start, the kids all seemed to be born with fucking driving licences, and their puppy love could flourish amid ice‐
cream parlours, soda‐
fountains and drive‐
ins. Somehow the thought of the corporation bus, the Napoli chippy and a sticky seat in the Paisley Kelburne didn’t seem a prospect likely to cement a tentative, fledgling amour.

So he’d just suffered instead, seeking consoling distraction in records, Betamax pirate videos and ZX Spectrums. You couldn’t have the girl of your dreams, but you could always go round to your mate’s house and play
Manic Miner
,
Lunar Jetman
or
Attic‐
Attac
to the constant accompaniment of The Jam, The Skids and The Clash, in between arguing whose turn it was to go downstairs and make toast. It was a travesty that women thought men naturally obsessed with such trivia: taking football too seriously, playing video games, building record collections. They weren’t. It was what they did because they couldn’t get a girlfriend, and unfortunately they got addicted to it like a crocked footballer gets hooked on painkillers, then keeps taking them once the injury’s cleared up.

‘So, ladies,’ as Matt had been fond of saying on stage, ‘it’s your own sorry fault. If your man seems more excited about the prospect of finding a limited‐
edition 10‐
inch remix of a fuckin’ Thompson Twins single than he is about the prospect of going to bed with
you
, then I’m afraid you’re just reaping the whirlwind for the time you knocked back one of his worldwide brethren for a dance at the 1982 Halloween disco.

‘Sure, like I wouldn’t have swapped any of those
memorable
nights sitting in a cramped bedroom with my emotionally retarded and hormone‐
addled school friends, watching each other’s boils gradually reach critical mass as we huddled round a portable TV set, endlessly rearranging our newly hairy tackle through the pockets of our jeans … Like I wouldn’t have swapped all that
every
night to be in the company of some sweet teenage girl, just talking, enjoying the sound of her voice, listening to her laughter, watching her smile … Long as there was a shag at the end of it, anyway.’

Yeah, that money‐
shot punchline. Got them every time. Everybody thought the gag was the ‘real’ Matt Black coming bursting through, but maybe its genuine purpose was to protect the nasty, dark comedian’s secret true identity. Maybe the purpose of the whole fucking thing had been to protect that: a sensitive wee guy with a fragile romanticism and an imprudent tendency to give a shit.

What was he doing standing here outside this building otherwise, if not hopefully seeking to discover whether that individual still existed? If not to discover whether, buried under the crumbled detritus of a besieging ego’s rampage – beneath the empty bottles, the powder‐
flecked shards, the headlines, the vicious lies, the worse truths, the friends alienated, the women used, the spotlights, the veneration, the notoriety (hurts so good), the indulgence, the decadence, the waste, the self‐
disgust and the self‐
obsession (honey) – there were still fragments of someone he’d once been?

And why else could he be even contemplating putting himself through the unspeakable horror of a school reunion – an invitation he’d have ceremonially incinerated less than a fortnight ago – if not to sift for traces of that person in the memories of the people he’d meet?

Matt completed his circuit and walked back to the hire car. He flipped open the glove compartment and reached for the road map, then fished the invite out of his bag. ‘Pick‐
up point: Kilbokie Bay, Cromarty Firth’, it stated on the topological diagram. He figured five hours would be plenty, even allowing for the caravan‐
convoys you’d inevitably hit on the A9 this time of year. A few patient moments disabled the philistine randomiser function before he popped in
London Calling
, ruling that such an otherwise despicable indulgence in nostalgia was excused by the context.

Pulling away from the row of parked cars, it occurred to him that there were two other constructive reasons for attending this absurd off‐
shore bash. One was that Simone Draper might not turn out to be married. The other was that he was bound to run into someone who’d fucked their life up worse than him.

‘But it cannae be a fuckin’ oil rig. Naebody’s gaunny go their holidays tae a fuckin’ oil rig. Be worse than Blackpool.’

‘It’s no’
actually
an oil rig, Charlie. It’s aw built on an oil‐
rig platform.’