The Blade Artist (3 page)

He hadn’t heard Elspeth’s voice in several years. Yet he recognised it straight away on the phone, without checking caller ID. Not that it would have come up, as they had long since lost touch. Their mother had died a few years back, after Jim had moved to the USA. Jim returned for the funeral, but had headed back to LA immediately afterwards. He had changed his number since then, without bothering to tell her. How had she got it? Elspeth was resourceful. His younger sister, ten years and four months between them. His brother Joe, just over a year older than him. And why was she getting in touch? It had to be about Joe, he was a heavy drinker. The drink took their father. It would get Joe too. — Elspeth . . .

— I googled you. Got your number from your agent. Took me a while to work out it was actually you . . . the Jim thing. Anyway, it’s not good news . . . Her voice wavers. — I’m really sorry . . . he can sense her crippling hesitancy, — . . . but Sean died yesterday. He was found in his flat.

Sean . . . what the fuck . . .

— That’s all I know right now, Elspeth says, a sad, fretful pain in her voice. More than the news, which provides only shock, her tone moves Jim Francis, as he and his sister hadn’t parted on good terms. — I’m so sorry . . .

Jim’s brain is scorched by the questions that pop into his head, jostling for his focus. He sucks air through his nose, filling his lungs. He thinks of June, the woman by whom he’d had Sean, and another boy, Michael. She’d presented the firstborn to him with an almost defiant pride.
See? See what I can do?
He’d felt some strange kind of personal vindication that had been beyond his expression, but little else. Then he’d gone to the pub and bought drinks for everybody and got hammered. A vision of baby Sean’s face, then June’s, and all the boys in that pub, suddenly sears into his consciousness. And then there’s Elspeth’s, his sister, now silent on the phone line. How proud she was then, as a young girl, to be an auntie. They all seemed to belong to a different life, one lived by somebody else. He looks at his tanned countenance in the mirror on the wall. Melanie is hovering behind him, her own face tense in the reflection. When Grace and Eve had come along it had been so different. He’d felt himself as something small, yet part of an infinite cosmos, and swarmed by an internal kaleidoscope of emotion, he’d cried and squeezed her hand.

— Are you still there? Elspeth’s voice on the line.

— You got a number for June?

Elspeth slowly enunciates the digits, which he taps into his iPhone with his free hand.

— Obviously I’ll be over. Will you phone me if you get any more details?

— Of course I will.

— Thanks . . . he coughs out, then lowers the landline receiver onto the cradle.

— It’s Sean, he says to Melanie. — He’s dead.

— Oh my God. Melanie clasps her hand to her mouth. — What happened?

— Found dead back in Edinburgh. Jim’s voice is flat and even. — I have to get over there, for the funeral, and to find out what happened, obviously.

— Of course, Melanie gasps, wrapping her arms around him. He is tense; she feels like a sweater hanging on a bronze statue. — What did they say?

— He’s dead, that’s all I know.

She lightens but maintains her grip on him. His bearing reminds her of when she first tried to hold him, when they got together, that terrible stiffness in his body. — I feel so bad, I never knew him, or Michael.

Jim is silent, as still and immobile as one of his pieces of sculpture. Melanie can feel his tension seeping into her, hardening her. Breaking off her grip, she lets her arms fall by her sides. — You won’t get involved in anything over there, will you?

Jim shakes his head dismissively. — What’s to get involved in? I just want to find out what happened, go to his funeral, he says, then adds, in a different voice, — see whose tears are real, whose are crocodille, and he moves through to the small office, sits down in front of the computer and goes online.

— Jim . . .

— You say you never knew him. Neither did I, Jim mutters, his dark brown eyes clouding. — When he was younger he was just a distraction to me. An irrelevance. Then I was in
the jail. I did everything wrong with him and his brother, he says, seeming to Melanie to grow almost conversational in his tone, like he is talking to someone else. It disconcerts her, and he picks up on it, sinking his voice. — When I had kids I said I’d never be the way my old man was with me. And I kept my word; I was worse, he allows, almost bluntly, as he pulls up the American Airlines page on the screen. Then he turns to her and says, intently, — But I’m different with the girls.

— Of course you are, you’re a great dad, Melanie says, probably a little too urgently. — It’s different now. You were too young, you –

— I was addicted to violence, Jim coldly confesses, tapping in information and pulling out his credit card. — But I’ve got that nonsense under control now, cause it doesn’t take me anywhere interesting. Just jail. Done too much of that.

— Yes. Melanie looks at Jim, squeezes his hand. She tries to find him, this man she’s married, whom she’d taken with her back to the States. All she can see is a Scottish jailbird she’d met years ago called Francis Begbie.

They came by the house on Friday nights for card school, when my ma was at the bingo. There was Grandad Jock, Carmie, Lozy and the much younger man, ‘Handsome’ Johnnie Tweed, the only one of them who ever gave me money. He’d take me aside and crush the odd quid note or ten-bob bit into my hand, and tip me a wee wink, so I knew that this was just between us. They were an arrogant, entitled quartet, prone to swaggering around in long Crombie overcoats and trilbies. I was fascinated by them all, so was my brother Joe.

My dad would be pished, with my uncle Jimmy. He was always rat-arsed. My ma would throw him out, sometimes for years. When he came back he’d be sober for a while, but that never lasted. Then he went away for ages. They said he was working on the rigs, but I knew he was in the jail or kipped up with some dozy hoor. Then he returned once more, and stayed long enough to give Ma my wee sister, Elspeth.

I eagerly anticipated those Friday nights, even if they had a strange edge to them. Grandad Jock would be nursing a beer, which he rarely finished, and sipping at a whisky. One only. He’d look at his two sons: drunk, sprawling, flatulent and loud-mouthed, and even as a kid, I could feel him seethe with disappointment. I suppose it was something that we shared.

My ma hated him and his trio of mates. Gangsters, she called them. Back then, in the late seventies, they were among the last men on the dwindling docks. All of them, bar Johnnie, had been there since the war and were nearing retirement. The older three, through being in a reserved occupation, had missed all the fighting. I always thought it ironic that cunts thought of as hard had used their job status to shite out from swedging the Nazis. But personal gain was their real motive. — They took everything that was meant for the working people, I mind my mother once saying to me. — Stole fae their ain. The war stuff, it was meant for everybody, no just they thieving ratbags.

That was a wee bit disingenuous. I’d look around at all the stuff in our house compared to the scruffs’ hooses. We had everything, until the old man pished it away. And you knew where it all came from. I never heard any talk from my ma of sending it back.

But she tried to keep me away from Grandad Jock and his mates. I was thirteen and in first year at school when they started to take an interest in me. That they didnae give a fuck about my brother Joe, fourteen months my elder, was good. It made me feel important.

Not a lot did back then.

I struggled with reading throughout primary school, and was put in dumbo classes in secondary. Letters and words on a page meant nothing, they were just a smudged code I couldn’t crack. I would, many years later, be diagnosed as dyslexic. But back then the teachers and snobby kids laughed at me for being slow and stupid. I raged inside, with such force that I nearly made
myself sick. Sitting there, at my desk, my breathing tight, almost passing out with fury. Then I learned that letting that rage out was the way to stop the laughter: to stop it by turning it into blood and tears.

So it felt good to be valued, by Grandad Jock and his pals; those bold, sly men, whom people seemed to fear and respect. Johnnie Tweed, though, I could never figure out. He was more ages with my dad, and I always thought he should have been
his
mate, rather than my grandad’s. As his nickname suggested, ‘Handsome’ Johnnie was a good-looking guy with big white teeth and a shock of dark bath-brush hair, cut in a short crew. He smelt of strong aftershave, cigarettes and alcohol, like all the men did when you were a kid, but there was always something a bit more fragrant about Johnnie.

I hated school, and worked part-time as a delivery boy at R & T Gibson, a grocer’s in Canonmills. I’d ride the big, black metal-framed bike, with boxes of groceries stuck in the huge basket at the front of it. I’d pedal this heavy monstrosity along busy
streets, my skinny wee legs pumping hard just to keep it upright. I also stacked the shelves in the shop. The owner of the store was not called Gibson, but Malcolmson: a high-voiced, excitable cunt. Malcolmson was always bossing me around, along with Gary Galbraith, the other schoolkid who worked there.

One Saturday morning Grandad Jock came into the shop with Carmie. Willie Carmichael was a colossal, silent man with hands like shovels, and was forever by Grandad Jock’s side. Jock wore this trademark lopsided smile, which I now associate with the word
snide.
He stared deeply at Malcolmson, who shuffled
around uncomfortably as they talked, his voice growing higher. — The Leeeeth dockers, aw aye, Jock, we’ve got tae keep the Leeeeth dockers happy!

My grandad’s cuntish smile never left his pus. He and Carmie took Malcolmson aside and whispered something to him. I kept out the way, stacking tins of pineapple chunks onto the shelves, but I could see Malcolmson’s eyes get bigger and wider and Jock’s and Carmie’s get all narrow and slitty. After, Jock said to me, — Make sure you work hard and behave yirsel for Mr Malcolmson here, boy, right?

— Aye.

Then they left the shop. Malcolmson said fuck all for a while, but later looked at me in a strange kind of awe and fear. Then he told us that Gary Galbraith would be doing most of the deliveries and I would be stacking shelves, inside, in the warm. This was good news for me, but not for Gary. It was fuckin Baltic outside on that bike. But there would be just one delivery that I would have to make three times a week: a box of fruit and veg to the Leith dockers. I had never seen my grandad or any of his friends ever eat a single piece of fruit, or a vegetable that wasn’t a tattie.

A nutter called John Strang, thick glasses, slicked-back hair, was the boy on the gate. He was known as a violent psycho, who had done time in Carstairs, a facility for the criminally insane. The stanes were cobbled, which didn’t matter too much going in, but when I came out, after visiting their howf, the box was full of heavy bottles of spirits, which you could hear rattling and clanking together. Of course Strang said fuck all; he was obviously being looked after by Jock and the others, but
just going past that magnified gape was unsettling enough. Then I would cycle back to the shop and dump the bottles into the skip at the rear of the building. Johnnie would later come by in a van to pick them up. I knew this was their way of operating, as I waited behind the bushes one night, down by the Water of Leith walkway, and saw him appear.

But I liked going down to the dockyards to meet my grandad Jock and his mates. You could tell they were a group apart and that the other dockers had no time for them. They hung out at this brick outbuilding by an old dry wharf, which they had commandeered as their HQ. It was right at the eastern side of the docks, bordered by a big wire fence and a set of industrial units, well away from the other dockers. I think this arrangement suited all parties. The ‘howf’, as they called it, was obviously meant to be an old storeroom; it had a wooden table and chairs, and a rack containing some cleaning materials. There was a light, no windows, the place ventilated only by air bricks at the top and bottom, and sealed off by a big wooden door, which was left slightly ajar when we were inside.

I’d sit with them, drinking tea from a mug, keeping warm by a Calor gas stove they always had on in the winter, listening to them chat. They sounded weird to my young ears, often talking in riddles, using words and ways of expressing themselves I couldn’t decipher. It was as if it was a different language, some kind of a code. They were like relics from another era.

They might have known fuck all about the Jam being top of the charts, but they knew about people, and their frailties. — See yir brother Joe, he’s scared ay you, Grandad Jock said to me once down the howf. — He kens he’s weaker than you.

I was floored by this revelation. Joe constantly bullied me: battering me, making my life hell. But I recognised a strange credibility in my grandad’s statement. There was a panic in Joe’s eyes when he beat me, like he was almost anticipating a retaliation that never came. But, armed with this insight, I resolved that it would now arrive. And he wouldn’t be expecting it. This old bastard Jock, who could smell a man’s vulnerability like a shark does blood in the water, he saw everything. He understood it all.

When I was younger I used to tell everybody this story of Joe and me, the story of the game-changer. The way I told it, though, I made it out that it was my dad that took me aside and told me to batter Joe’s face in with a brick as he slept. That was how I wanted my father to be, to have that kind of will to power. But it wasn’t my dad. It was my grandad. It was old Jock.