Runaway (4 page)

‘Aye, very likely.’ Jack took Dave’s arm. ‘Come on, let’s go see what Maurie has to say for himself.’

If anything, Maurie seemed worse than he had the previous evening. He lay with his eyes half closed, skin the colour and texture of putty, his arms lying outside the sheets, giant knuckles on withered hands. There were three nurses sitting on the end of his bed watching
The Street
tonight, more interested in idle chatter than anything on-screen.

‘Jesus!’ Jack said. ‘He’s foaming at the mouth!’

And the three of them jumped off the bed, turning in alarm as Maurie opened his eyes and looked confused.

‘He’s not!’ The senior nurse turned an accusatory look towards Jack, who just shrugged.

‘Aye, well, he might have been, and you wouldn’t have been any the wiser, would you?’ He held the door open. ‘Would you mind, ladies? We’ve got things to discuss here with Mr Cohen.’

All three glared at him and made their exit with a bad grace. Jack closed the door. Dave gazed at Maurie in shocked disbelief.

‘Bloody hell, mate, what have you been drinking? You look worse than me.’

Which forced a smile to Maurie’s lips. ‘Aye, well . . .’ he said. ‘I think my liver’s about the only thing left functioning.’ He heaved himself into a seated position. ‘Good to see you, Dave. You still playing?’

Dave flicked a glance at Jack. ‘No’ as much as I’d like, Maurie. You still singing?’

‘Like a lintie.’ Which made him laugh, which turned into a cough, and they heard phlegm and God knows what else rattling in his chest.

‘You’re in no fit state tae go tae London, boy,’ Dave said.

‘I’m as fit as I’ll ever be.’

‘Aye, well, that’s probably true.’ Dave pulled up a chair and leaned in towards Maurie. ‘Yer aff yer fucking heid, man. We cannae go tae London.’ Dave’s accent had always broadened when he got emotional. ‘We’ve nae money, nae transport, and you cannae walk. So we’re gonnae get far, eh?’

‘I’ve got money,’ Maurie said.

‘Good for you. I huvnae.’ He looked at Jack, who was watching them from the end of the bed. Then he turned sad eyes back to Maurie. ‘It’s a crazy idea, man. Give it up.’

But Maurie shook his head. ‘No.’ He looked from one to the other. ‘And if you won’t go with me, I’ll pay someone to take me.’

‘Give us one good reason why we should,’ Dave said.

‘Because it’s the right thing to do. Even if it has taken me fifty years to realize it.’

‘Jack says you’re saying it wisnae Flet who killed that guy, after all.’

Maurie nodded.

‘So who did?’

Maurie drew a deep breath. ‘You’re going to have to trust me on that.’

Dave blew air through his teeth. ‘Why?’

Maurie seemed wounded by Dave’s doubt. ‘Because we have more than fifty years of friendship between us.’ He fought to draw in another breath. ‘And what have any of us got to lose now? How long before you’re in a home, like Jack here? Or in a recovery ward. How long before we’re all bloody dead?’

Giving voice to things that none of them had dared even to think about brought a sudden reflective silence to the group. But Maurie wasn’t finished.

‘And I’ll be gone before any of you. All the regrets of my life piled up like overdrafts in a bankrupt account. Only blessing is that I’ve no kids to be ashamed of me. To cover up the legacy of a disgraced father. Disbarred for fraud and eighteen months in the Bar-L. Christ, my own family’ll hardly talk to me.’

The sudden colour in his face was unhealthy. A damaged heart working too hard to pump blood to his head.

‘Take it easy, Maurie,’ Jack said.

Maurie turned fiery eyes in his direction. ‘And what do you have to show for it all, Jack? Forty years counting other people’s money? You were talented once.’

Jack tried not to let Maurie’s words hurt him. He had built his own defences against failure long ago. ‘Lots of people are talented, Maurie. But it’s not enough on its own. You should know that better than anyone.’

Maurie couldn’t hold his gaze, and his eyes drifted off into some distant past existing now only in his memory. ‘Voice of an angel, they said.’ Then he snapped back to the present, looking from one to the other defiantly. ‘But no point regretting what you can’t change. And as long as I’m breathing, there are some things I still can.’

‘Like what?’ Dave said.

‘Well, for one thing, I’m stopping the damned chemo. The cure’s worse than the fucking ill, and it’s not curing me. So I’ll spend the rest of my days on painkillers, and I’ll not miss throwing up every five minutes.’ He paused. ‘And I’ll do what I should have done fifty years ago. Even if I can’t change it, I can put it right. I’m going, whether you come with me or not.’ He glared at them defiantly. ‘Well? We weren’t scared to run away when we were seventeen. And we had everything to lose then.’ He chuckled mirthlessly. ‘Blew it, too.’ Then he refocused. ‘Could be this is our last chance to do anything. Anything!’ He raised his eyes expectantly, shifting his gaze from one friend to the other.

The cold night air in the car park came as a shock after the stuffy heat of the hospital.

Jack breathed in deeply. ‘This is insane, Dave.’

Dave shook his head. ‘Naw. Running away tae the Big Smoke when we were seventeen, that was insane. This is much worse.’ He turned a serious face towards his co-conspirator, before a big smile wiped years off it.

Jack said, ‘We’re going to need transport. And someone to drive. I’m still not allowed.’ He glanced at Dave.

‘Aye, I know. And I’m no’ to be trusted.’

The sky above them was a sparkling black velvet, a gibbous moon rising into view above Langside College. The sound of traffic filled the air. ‘Dave . . . I’m only going to do this if you promise to stay off the drink. At least until it’s all over.’

Dave grinned. ‘Nae problem. Man of steel, me. Iron willpower.’

Jack looked at him sceptically and sighed, then turned to look up at the ugly black edifice of the infirmary towering above them. ‘And we’re going to have to figure out some way of getting Maurie out of there.’

_II

He sat for a long time in the dark. Light from the street lamps in the car park fell through his window in long, dissected slabs that lay across the floor. He had not brought much with him from the home he had shared with Jenny for nearly thirty-seven years. A leather recliner and footstool. A two-seater settee that folded down into a bed for guests who never came. There was a bookcase full of the books he had read as a young man, when ideas were fresh and new and a whole generation believed they could change the world. How naive had they been?

A signed Russell Flint watercolour hung on the wall facing the window. A girl on a beach with a headscarf and a large fishing net on a pole. Wonderful light on sands recently uncovered by the receding tide. It had come from his parents’ house, one of two that had been his mother’s pride and joy. And yet, they could only, surely, have been a constant reminder of her own thwarted ambition?

A large flat-screen TV, bought for the flat, simmered silently in a shadowed corner, only the red standby light betraying its presence. A drop-leaf table was pushed against the wall by the door to a tiny kitchen that was little more than a scullery.

This was his space. These were his things. This was his life. Everything diminished to fit within the confines of these four walls.

He hated to admit it to himself. But he was lonely. He missed Jenny. Even though she had never been the love of his life, she was the one he had settled for. And they had always been friends, sharing a life of extraordinary ordinariness together. A life like so many others, treading water in a sea of mediocrity, until sinking without trace. Which she had done nine years ago, stolen away by her cancer.

He pushed himself up out of the recliner and crossed stiffly to the bookcase below the window. Why did everything hurt, these days? Her photograph stood in an elaborately worked pewter frame, a gift from Susan. He lifted it and tilted it towards the light, and her smile filled him with sadness. He ran his fingertips lightly over the glass, as if maybe he could still touch her. But the feel of it beneath his fingers was cold and hard.

She was, perhaps, in her early forties here. She had probably been dyeing her hair even then, but the illusion of youth was successful enough. It was a photograph he had taken himself, and it was something about the love in her eyes that had always touched him. And he wondered if she had ever realized that he didn’t love her back. Not really. And yet, what was love? For hadn’t he been devastated in the losing of her?

He replaced the frame carefully on the bookcase and turned his watch towards the light from the window. Time to tell her.

He double-checked that his keys were in his pocket before he pulled the door shut, and slipped as quietly as he could along the hall. His footsteps echoed faintly back at him from the walls and glass of the stairwell as he climbed slowly to the second floor. The door of her flat was at the end of the corridor, large windows facing out towards the school.

He knocked softly and waited in the thick silence of the night, breathing deeply to catch his breath. He didn’t hear her approach before the door opened and she peered out anxiously into the hall. Her smile lit the darkness when she saw him, and the door opened wider to let him in. He saw immediately that she’d had her hair done. A sheer silk nightdress tumbled almost to the floor beneath her open gown. He smelled her perfume and felt the familiar stirrings of desire. Feelings that never went away. Along with the need for someone to share a shrinking life.

She closed the door and turned to face him expectantly. He slipped his arms around her, drawing her to him, and felt her warmth and her softness. He lay his head on her shoulder for a moment, before kissing her neck and then stepping back to look at her. Something in his eyes or his demeanour said more than he ever could, and her smile faded. A woman’s instinct.

‘What’s wrong?’

He steeled himself. ‘Fiona, I’ve got to go away for a while.’

And it struck him that this was really just history repeating itself.

Half a century later.

1965

CHAPTER THREE

_I

It’s hard to remember now all the various things that came together to make me want to run away. But the tipping point was my expulsion from school. And, of course, I was always blamed for leading the others astray. But it really wasn’t like that.

I was born just after the war, into what they later called the ‘baby boomer’ generation. And I grew up in Glasgow in the fifties and sixties, two decades that morphed from sepia to psychedelic before my very eyes as I segued from childhood to adolescence.

We lived in the south-side suburb of Clarkston, once a village in the Eastwood district of East Renfrewshire, but subsumed already into the creeping urban sprawl of Scotland’s industrial heartland. I remember the trams, and the cranes on the Clyde when they still built ships there. I remember the smoke-blackened sandstone tenements that they knocked down in the post-war years before discovering sandblasting, and the marvellous red and honeyed stone that lay beneath the grime. Flats that, once renovated, are still lived in today, while those they built to replace them have long since been demolished.

I sometimes wish I could get hold of those planners and architects and wring them by the neck.

My father taught English and maths at a school in the east end. He was raised in tenement flats on the south side, opposite Queen’s Park. His father had been a street artist before the First World War, but joined the Royal Flying Corps during the war years and trained as a photographer. Somewhere I still have an album of his photographs, taken while lying along the length of some flimsy fuselage and pointing a clumsy camera at the trenches below. Early aerial surveillance. The trenches just looked like cracks in dried mud. Hard to believe there were people in them. After the war he opened his own photographic studio in Great Western Road.

I suppose my dad must have got his religion and his politics from
his
dad. My father was an atheist, and a socialist in a constituency that was then a Conservative stronghold. By a process of osmosis, I guess I must have acquired both from him.