Random (7 page)

Uh huh. Fingers crossed right enough. Couple of dozen meant there would be five or six. Hopeful meant very unlikely. In their diary meant no fucking chance. We had been there so many times before.

With that, she swept up whatever it was she felt she needed and deposited them in a selection of bags and pockets. A last mouthful of tea was knocked back in an exaggerated haste and the cup placed down with the hurried air of a woman on a mission.

A last look round, a wave of her hand as if she didn’t even have time to speak, and she was out and off to catch the eight o’clock train to Edinburgh. I watched the door bang shut and could only shake my head at the shudder that was left behind. It wasn’t just the eight-hour shift that had left me tired.

I tried to listen to her footsteps as they faded away, tried to capture the final, faint smack of heel on concrete, strained to hear the very last sound that I could. With each wilting, softening step I spiralled into sleep until my head was on the table and my mind had drifted to another time, another place.

I sat like that for an hour before waking sore and stiff and dragging myself off to a cold bed for a further four uneasy hours of sleep. As ever, slumber offered no escape from a waking nightmare. It just brought memories and distorted versions of an already disturbed reality. I’d long since given up any hope of finding some sanctuary with my eyes shut.

It was nearly five before she returned, as deflated and self-righteous as I’d expected. She dropped her bags and coat as if throwing off armour. The weary warrior returned from the front.

The same dance as the morning. I was to ask how it had gone. I didn’t care. She would tell me anyway. The truth was found between the lines. She had stood in the rain outside the Parliament for three hours along with eight other well-intentioned, misguided halfwits. Every one of them holding a sign and wasting their time. This wasn’t how it was told to me.

Few MSPs even noticed the dripping bodies littering the entrance to their talking shop and those that did paid little attention. Eventually one made a token gesture and invited three of them in out of the rain for a cup of tea and a five-minute head-nodding session. A cursory chat forgotten as soon as they were back on the Royal Mile.

Suitably patronized, the would-be revolutionaries had trotted off again, overflowing with self-praise and having achieved the square root of fuck all. Oh how pleased with themselves they were on the train back to Glasgow. Making notes, eating sandwiches and taking it in turn to pat each other on the back.

Nor was that the end of her day of busy non-achievement. In the afternoon, she was back in Glasgow pushing for a meeting with members of the education committee. I hated to think what they made of her. Probably filed under nutter or nuisance.

She maybe even knew that but it wouldn’t stop her. Nothing would. She had her mission, just as I had mine. She had tried to get me involved, of course she did, but it was another battle she could never win. At first I made excuses, couldn’t be here, couldn’t make it there. I was working, I was tired. But she kept pushing till I just had to tell her straight that I didn’t want to get involved.

I had stopped short of telling her why. Spared her that added pain and she inevitably responded by resenting me, shutting me out even further. She grudged my lack of involvement, hated my disinterest. Thought I was just sitting back and taking it, doing nothing.

I let her think it. To do otherwise would have meant opening up a deep can of worms we were both desperately trying to keep a lid on.

So she had done her duty, another day of active inaction and now she was home signalling the start of the collapse, the sinking into oblivion.

The first pill was taken within ten minutes of her being through the door. She halted her deluded monologue just long enough to sip water and bite tablet. Lockdown had begun for the night.

She was still talking as I sat a plate and cutlery in front of her. She was still telling her self-serving lies when I dropped a breast of chicken, new potatoes and green beans onto the plate. The food was no more than a minor barrier to her. The one-sided conversation was her justifying her existence and it would have been cruel to interrupt.

Finally the food was gone and the talk began to fade. She was dropping deeper.

The television propped her up for a few hours. Staring at the box in the corner, the spirit going and the flesh weakening. Images playing back across her increasingly glassy eyes, soap operas and situation comedies sending her deeper and deeper.

I sat too, in a growing conspiracy of silence. Not watching, not caring, my own plans playing out in the theatre of my mind.

By nine all the pills were rattling around inside her as she made her way upstairs to bed. I knew that in minutes she would be fast asleep.

By day a misdirected human dynamo. By night a spent force. By day the accidental campaigner. By night a lockeddown impenetrable cell. The day was the fuel and the night the hunger.

Day and night shutting out demons that were hurling themselves at her door, battering to be let in. Better to let them inside. Welcome them with open arms and use them to your ends. Better by far.

With her gone I still sat and gazed at the television. No more or less lonely now that I was alone. The night was mine and there was work to be done. I’d drive the streets and see what the morning was to bring.

Sauchiehall Street is now a straight, mile-long broadway but it used to be completely different. It was once a winding, narrow lane with villas each standing in an acre of garden. I liked that. The idea of random, winding roads turned into a direct route. The name came from two old Scots words that have since been bastardized into English, much like the entire country.
Saugh
is the Scots word for a willow tree and
haugh
means meadow. That’s why I started counting at Miss Cranston’s old place near the corner of Blythswood Street, the Willow Tea Rooms. Good a reason as any.

I’d begun walking at the Donald Dewar statue in front of the Royal Concert Hall but didn’t begin a countdown until I got to the tea rooms and the windows full of the Mockintosh stuff that would have had Charles Rennie spinning in his art nouveau grave. The tea rooms were Glasgow history though, a tourist’s favourite.

The Room De Luxe had silver furniture and leaded glass work, a genuine thing of beauty produced in a city of sweat and ugly temper. Mackintosh’s genius was to harness Glasgow’s contrasts, mixing right angles and curves, traditional and modernist, poverty and prosperous, beauty and beaten brow.

A good place to start.

The place you begin is always important. Not as vital as where you finish but important all the same. There is logic and logic. Some would have considered me crazy but I had my own reasoning.

I counted as best I could.

One. A youngish guy in a Rangers away top. Cap pushed back on his head, tracksuit trousers and trainers. Classic ned look. Crappy chain round his neck. Lovebites and at least one tattoo.

Two. His mate. Same uniform except with the addition of a scar from ear to mouth. His hands thrust in his pockets, his mouth going at a hundred miles an hour, man.

Three. A girl. Just a bit older than Sarah would have been. Perhaps nineteen or twenty. Knee-length boots and a short skirt. Way too much make-up. She looked at me. I didn’t like that. She was someone’s daughter. Some father waiting to be hurt.

Four. A jaikie bouncing from bin to bin. That special Scottish pallor on his face; white skin gone grey, red nose and battered cheeks. He was smiling all over his face and just for a second I envied him. He most probably didn’t have any more than a couple of quid in his pocket and his brain was fried with Bucky but he was happy. Remember happy?

He stopped me, cut across my path and stood there so I couldn’t pass. He started singing to me with his hand held out in front of him. This wasn’t good, not good at all. It was changing things and it would make people look at us. At me.

I could smell him. Dampness on his clothes, foul BO and rancid breath. He was murdering ‘Danny Boy’ with this stupid grin on him. I wanted away, wanted past, wanted to keep counting. People were flooding by and I wasn’t counting them.

I scrambled into my pocket and pulled out a couple of pound coins, thrusting them at him to buy freedom. I needed past him, had to get on. But instead of getting away, it made him thank me, grasping at my hands, his breath hammering at me.

Panic took a hold. I wanted to shake him off, throw him to the ground. People were passing by and everything was changing. The dirty, drunken old bastard didn’t know what he was doing. I couldn’t have this.

He treated me to another verse of ‘Danny Boy’. I was his new best friend but I wanted to be anywhere else but there.

I tore my hand out of his, breathing hard and dancing round him. He was shouting at me as I moved. I ignored him and prayed everyone else was doing the same.

I marched on, counting and walking. Ticking them off as they passed me, then and not before. Walking. Counting. Waiting.

Five and six passed in a blur. Seven, eight, nine rushed by and I felt as if a flood was going over me. Business suits and green school uniforms, ladies doing lunch and builders’ bums. I was drowning in possibilities and realities.

I was spinning, reeling out of control and had to regain it. Ten, eleven, twelve, they kept coming. I was counting, trying to slow my breathing and calm my nerves all at once.

It was eighteen before I was remotely settled. A balding businessman with a briefcase stuffed under his arm. He caught me looking at him and glared. That was OK. He’d never think anything of it.

Nineteen and twenty were a young couple hand-in-hand. I was composed now. He was tall and fair, she was short and bottle-blonde. I was fine again. They were giggling and whispering.

I slowed, I breathed out. I kept counting. Walking and counting. I had crossed Blythswood Street and had already counted past thirty.

So many people. It wouldn’t be long.

There was a rush through the mid-forties and a lull before a few more crossed my path. Not for the first time it struck me how many of the population of the dear green place came in only two colours, ash grey or sunbed orange. The browbeaten and UV beaten. Glasgow was all-sorts. All races, shapes and sizes and they kept coming past me. I tried to paint quick pen pictures of them in my mind but how could you tell the reasonably well-off from the struggling, the Protestant from the Catholic, the asylum seeker from Jock Tamson’s bairn, the Pole from the Partick boy? How did you differentiate the oppressed from the oppressor, the trodden down and those that trod on them, the deserving and those that deserved it?

I didn’t know and it didn’t matter. Maybe better that I didn’t know.

Past the queue at Greggs and past Paperino’s. Three to go and I had a definite feeling of how close it was. I itched for it. I wanted to look ahead but stopped myself.

Fifty-four, near the corner of Douglas Street, was a young bearded guy with a bag over his shoulder and a look of superior stupidity on his face. A student. A member of the most feckless, pampered bunch of idiots on the planet. Time was he’d have been planning a revolution or protesting against the occupation of Iraq. At the very least he’d have been tending his cannabis harvest. This guy was probably going to see his financial adviser or going home to watch
Neighbours
. Oh he’d have done.

Still he was only number fifty-four.

My heart was pounding. I told myself to be calm. Fifty-six would be here and nothing could stop it any more than worrying would hasten it.

Fifty-five was an old Chinese woman. She was maybe about 120 and seemed less than five foot but then she was bent near double, forced over by time and rain. Something about her reminded me of an old neighbour. I couldn’t think of her name but then I couldn’t think of much else but the next person that would walk past me. It could be anyone at all. It excited me, sickened me, slightly scared me. My pulse galloped.

I dragged my eyes along the pavement but saw no feet. There was no one in the three or four yards of me. Then I saw a pair of shoes. Small shoes.

I raised my eyes and saw a boy of about eleven or twelve. Fuck.

He had a mop of fair hair and a squint grin, scuffing his feet along Sauchiehall Street as he gazed half-heartedly into shop windows. Oh fuck.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

He seemed in a bit of a daydream, this kid without a care in the world. The tail of his shirt was hanging below his jumper in the way that boys liked to wear it. Faded jeans. That silly, quirky grin.

Rules. Number fifty-six.

I felt sick to my stomach. Rules. My rules.

The boy glanced up, curious. I must have been staring right at him. Of course I was. He was still walking and I willed him to stop. He wasn’t going to. He was nearly in front of me. Stop, you have to stop.

Two more steps and he would be number fifty-six.

Then, from somewhere off my radar, a shape pushed past the boy, barging into his shoulder and knocking him over. The shape charged past me.

I watched the boy pick himself up and offer a dirty look to the person that had shoved him.

I followed his gaze and saw a short, stocky guy in his mid-twenties barrelling back up the street, not mindful in the least of anyone around him. I was looking at the back of number fifty-six.