The Bad Fire (11 page)

Eddie was quiet for a moment. ‘Last time he phoned me, about six weeks ago, he said he wished he could go back and change the past. He'd been drinking then too.'

Joyce said, ‘He couldn't express his feelings without a lubricant. It's all that macho Presbyterian stuff you get drummed into you when you're growing up in Glasgow. A real man never weeps, he just gets on with things.'

Eddie rose from the sofa and walked to the window and looked down into the street. The streetlamps were surrounded by so many small winged creatures the effect was of silvery liquid movement. His mind slipped back to the day of the departure from Glasgow, and he pictured Joyce as he'd stepped inside the taxi with his mother. He remembered Flora, weepy but trying to be all business, saying to the cabby,
Take us to the airport fast, we've got a plane to catch
, and the cabby, a man with a lazy eye that looked off into a wild blue yonder, coming back with something sarcastic like,
Are ye sure ye don't want a bloody police escort, missus?

Eddie had turned his face as the cab pulled away and he'd seen Joyce watching from the shadow of the house in Onslow Drive, skipping rope held limp in one hand, her black hair curled and a big bright blue ribbon on the crown of her head. Her look had been one of puzzlement and pain.

The image made him ache.

Eddie said flatly, ‘He cut the family in two.'

‘Like a madman with an axe,' Joyce said.

She walked to the window and stood behind her brother, and put her arms around him, clasping her hands against his chest. He covered one of her hands with his own and said nothing, just watched the streetlights. A car slid past slowly below.

‘I can't imagine Flora's state of mind,' Joyce said. ‘Your husband tells you he'll fight for custody of both kids, he'll drag you through the whole legal system even if it takes years and he's got the cash to do exactly what he threatens. He issues an ultimatum – choose one kid, or risk losing both.'

This was the version Eddie had heard so many times from Flora. He looked at his sister. How frail she seemed in the soft light of the lamp; almost like a kid on the cusp of adolescence.

She said, ‘Jackie always tried to do his best for me after Flora went. I couldn't bring myself to hate him for what he'd done. Oh, I tried. I really
wanted
to hate him. I used to get down on my knees and pray I could
learn
to hate him. God, teach me to hate … Daft. In the end, forgiveness takes less energy.' She smiled, sipped a little wine. ‘Have you forgiven him?'

‘I like to think so,' Eddie said. ‘Or maybe I've just fudged what happened in the past. Discarded it. I'm not sure.'

‘You know, I used to think Flora chose to take you to America because you were her favourite.'

‘No. She thought I could cope with the upheaval better because I was older. She was obsessed for years with saving money and hiring a hotshot lawyer in the States to fight for custody of you, but time passed, and she could never get the cash together …'

Fatigued, Eddie moved to the sofa, lay down. He crossed his hands on his chest and stared at the ceiling where the lamp created an oval of weak light. Giving up a child, he thought. It would hurt like hell. It would be a pain you could never alleviate. Day after day you'd haul a sense of loss around with you, and people might detect it in your mannerisms, the far-off look that would come into your face. But it wasn't only Flora who'd given up a child. Jackie Mallon had deprived himself of his son by his own brute act of spite. He'd punished himself as well as Flora.

That one big mistake, Dad. That heartbreaking cruelty. That's where the halo is corroded.

He was beginning to drift now. Couldn't fight it much longer. After a while he heard Joyce stub her cigarette. He felt her kiss his forehead softly and say, ‘We'll get through all this.'

‘Sure we will,' he said. She switched the lamp off. The darkness was comforting. He heard her cross the floor and enter her bedroom. She closed the door quietly.

He lay, fully clothed, on an unfamiliar sofa he didn't have the strength to open into a bed.

He slipped into sleep, dreamed he was dancing, he and Senga waltzing on board a cruise ship. The orchestra played ‘Moonlight in Vermont'. The conductor had Flora's face. In the dream he looked at the tattoo on Senga's arm and he knew what it was. It surprised him. He thought: I'm mistaken. He woke briefly, considered the tattoo, then everything floated away from him and he fell into a sleep that was deep and this time dreamless.

14

At six thirty a.m., Billy McQueen, AKA Billy the Stump or Billy Wan-Fittit, read the morning newspapers in his Merchant City penthouse. The building in which he lived had been a derelict warehouse before razor-brained developers realized that the city centre of Glasgow was a very desirable place to live, if you were of the cellphone, fast-buck, nightclubbing slick-car generation; and so Merchant City had been created out of shabby Victorian warehouses and banks and offices, its new apartments purchased by lawyers and glitzy media types.

Billy McQueen didn't come into these categories. He was a middleman, a fixer who brought people together to make deals, and he took a generous percentage of profits for his troubles. He insisted on receiving a portion of his fee upfront as a token of goodwill. Officially he was an accountant, the profession specified on his income-tax returns, which were invariably works of superlative invention. He had no training in accountancy; he lived and operated in cracks and shadows.

He was insomniac because he drank gallons of rich coffee every day. His internal clock was in a state of confusion. His complexion was the colour of cigarette ash. He had a pendant lower lip that gave him the look of a man trapped in a lifelong grudge. He Brylcreemed his hair lavishly; wherever he slept he left grease-pits on pillows.

Dressed in sky-blue silk pyjamas and matching robe, he flicked the pages of the papers quickly; he was interested only in information about the murder of Jackie. What he read was bland and unsatisfying.
The investigation is ongoing … yackety-yak
. He felt the journalists were keeping facts back. Or maybe it was the police. You could go a step further and think they were in collusion, a clique of scribblers and cops.

He got out of bed, leaving a trail of newspapers. He limped into the kitchen. Twenty years ago, at the age of eighteen, he'd lost his left leg below the knee when he'd been drunk and taking a short cut across a railway line in Cowcaddens, and a train had whacked into him. Since then he'd worn a series of prosthetic limbs, some better than others. His present attachment chafed his stump a little, but he'd learned to live with discomfort, although he'd never grown accustomed to his demeaning nicknames. The Stump was an insult. So was Wan-Fittit – or, more properly, One-Footed.

That bloody short cut turned out to be a longer cut than you ever expected, didn't it?
his father had said to him after the accident.

Ho ho. Comedian.

The kitchen was a big white room with granite surfaces. The skinny girl at the table was smoking hashish and reading the magazine section of an old
Sunday Mail
which was mostly fluff about rockers and film stars. McQueen hated tabloids. He liked the broadsheets. He liked to think he was scuba-diving in the Sea of Information, not just floating on the surface.

The skinny girl, who had an urchin's white face, said, ‘I just made coffee.'

‘I'll partake,' said McQueen. He filled a mug from the percolator. He sipped the coffee. His hands trembled. The girl's name was Leila, a regular supplied by a discreet escort agency he used. He liked to think of Leila as more than a call-girl. A friend. A lover.

Billy's life was separated into compartments. He lived with his manic depressive, ailing father in a four-bedroom flat in a respectable street in Hyndland. West End, red sandstone, classy. Larry McQueen didn't know about the penthouse in Merchant City. He thought his son travelled to distant cities on business trips.

Billy looked at the girl as he blew on the surface of his coffee. She wore a tight-fitting little sweater and black bikini underwear. He checked the time on his watch: 7:04. He knew his father would be awake. The old man slept only four hours a day, from midnight to four a.m. He was troubled by nightmares.

Billy picked up the phone, punched in a number and heard his father answer.

‘How you doing?' McQueen said.

‘Awright, awright.' Larry McQueen's voice was stressed. ‘Where are you anyway?'

‘Manchester,' McQueen said. ‘Did you take your medication?'

‘What are you – my bloody nurse? ‘Course I took my medication, for all the bloody good it does me.'

McQueen held the phone away from his ear and let his father rant. He pictured the old guy sitting up in bed, moaning and whining. Billy tried to be a dutiful son. He did his best. He really did. It wasn't easy. Some days the old fellow would lie on the living-room sofa and stare at the ceiling and say nothing, lost in secret melancholic depths, or else he'd take out his dilapidated guitar and strum a few truly depressing Jacobite folk tunes, like ‘Will you no' come back again?'

He wanted to put Larry into a nursing home, but he didn't have the heart to evict the old fellow. He'd even hired a part-time nurse to look in on his father a couple of times a week, but Larry was abusive to this scrawny old biddy who was called Thelma Rogan. Whenever he could, Billy escaped to Merchant City, fifteen minutes away from the West End by taxi. In the penthouse he could have Leila and a sense of privacy in a place where his father couldn't find him.

‘What year can I expect you?' Larry asked.

Sarcasm, always the dead-weight sarcasm. ‘A few hours. I'm not sure.'

‘You're never precise, are you? It's a wonder to me that you ever made it as an accountant when you can't even tell the bloody time. Eh? How did you manage it? Did you bribe the examiners? You're a numpty, Billy.'

Drone drone. Insult insult. Billy held the handset away from his ear. His father's voice sounded like a gnat trapped in a bottle. Jesus Christ, Billy had spent his whole life listening to Larry carping at him. You're a useless waste of space, Billy, you'll amount to nothing.

Bitter old git. Never a kind word.

Billy said, ‘I'll be back before the TV gets delivered.'

‘What TV?'

‘I told you about it yesterday and the day before that.' What was the point? The old man rarely remembered anything from one day to the next except to insult his son. His brain was a decaying sponge in a bowl of stale fluid. ‘A new TV is coming, Dad. Digital.'

‘Digiwhat?'

‘
Christ
. We went through all this.' Billy killed the line before he lost his patience entirely.

Larry would assume that the sudden disconnection was a flaw in the cellphone, even though Billy wasn't using one. Sometimes Billy found the unpredictability of cellphones a useful ploy. Just went dead, Dad. Must have gone out of range. He often escaped Larry's abuse by severing the connection. Larry didn't understand cellphones anyway. In fact, he'd been so unhappy since the country had converted to decimal currency that he'd never used a public telephone after they stopped accepting the old-style pennies and the big black coin boxes had been removed.

When can I expect you?
When indeed. Billy didn't want to leave this penthouse. He wanted to sit here with the slatted blinds drawn and never go anywhere again.

The girl came back and poured some coffee. ‘Want any more, Billy?'

‘Fill me up,' he said.

The girl poured into his cup. Then she sat down and stoked up her little hash pipe. She inhaled deeply before offering him the pipe, which he declined. She looked very stoned. Her eyes were two damp rubies. Billy studied her face, which was pretty in an emaciated way.

Leila had some story about how she was working her way flat on her back through university, and Billy believed it. He liked to believe most things, because all he ever wanted was an easy passage through life; no bloody traffic cones.

He wanted simplicity.

But now he was on a slip-road he didn't like at all, and he wasn't sure what lay ahead or even the direction he was meant to be taking. In the beginning it had been straightforward. A little tricky, but most deals had an element of risk. You expected that. What you didn't expect was a participant getting himself killed along the way –

Shot in the face. Awful.

And way out of Billy McQueen's league. This is what comes of consorting with hard criminal types.

A stern voice in his head said,
Cut your losses and run, Billy
.

Run where precisely?

The smell of hash was strong. He got up, opened a window. Very thin sunlight was rising over the city. He didn't like that. He wanted the dark to last a long time because it was comforting. Now Leila, doped to the deepest recesses of her brain, had begun to chatter. She spoke ramblingly of her affection for wire-haired terriers, her fear of death by suffocation and Ronald Reagan's role in
The Killers
– there seemed to be some political point in what she had to say about this movie that escaped Billy McQueen.

Billy couldn't just sit here and listen to a stoned girl rambling on about nothing. He didn't have time for that. He grabbed the handset of the telephone and jabbed the number pad with a fingertip.

The voice that answered was quiet, almost a whisper. ‘Gurk.'

McQueen said, ‘Look, I know events have taken, uh, an unexpected turn. But who could have foreseen anything like this?'

The man called Gurk was silent for a while. Something about Gurk troubled McQueen. Even the name.
Gurk
. Sounded like the noise made by an air bubble popping in a waste-disposal unit clogged with custard.

‘I was meditating, man,' Gurk said. He was black with a London accent, East End or close to it. ‘I don't like being interrupted when I meditate.'