on your team. Lennox would never be like that. In a square go he could kick-box Gillman into a pulp. But he’d never end his life. So Gillman would pick himself up and come for him and snuff him out like a candle. Unlike Lennox, he set no limits. As the superior cop in the hierarchy Lennox was as powerless as a liberal parent who didn’t believe in corporal punishment dealing with a calculating, psychotic offspring.
Strange then, to be thinking of Gillman, while gazing idly at the pretty Hispanic waitress, light and graceful as she hops like a small bird between tables, dispensing coffee.
— Do you think she’s good-looking? Tianna asks.
— I suppose so, he says, musing that the kid missed nothing. It strengthens his resolve never to have children, especially a daughter.
Tianna’s voice goes musical. — I want my hair cut so I get bangs.
Lennox decodes the glint in her eye as sly and the blood ices in his veins. Tianna quickly picks up on his reaction. She pulls strands of hair across her forehead. — Like here, she explains.
— Oh… a fringe. Lennox is relieved, as his heartbeat normalises.
She glances up at him with an unexpected coldness, laying something inside of him to waste. The fond, paternal vibe that was settling in evaporates as he sees himself through her eyes; from the knowing, contemptuous ferocity in her glance, he might as well be a jug-eared rookie cop telling a snooty, rich woman that she can’t park here.
Uncle Chet will be the man, he thinks, his head buzzing.
— Chet’s not like that, though?
Her head twists vigorously.
— Is he your mum’s brother or your father’s brother?
— Just Chet, and she clams up into silence again. The waitress skips over with the bill, looking to the line that has formed at the door. Lennox takes the hint and settles up, they rise and make their way outside.
Another surrogate uncle. But did that have to be a bad thing? He himself was now attempting to fulfil that very same role, and knew practically nothing about young girls. He tries to remember what his sister Jackie was like at Tianna’s age. It was different evaluating someone when looking up at them from a kid’s perspective. Five years his senior, Jackie was the one they thought would do well. Her horse-riding lessons were a big deal in the family, making a powerful statement about them. And she had prospered. Became a lawyer; then married a top one, a man whom Lennox, burdened with an unshakeable belief that anyone who talked for a living was a bullshitter, had to fight every impulse not to openly detest.
He’d sensed Jackie’s contempt for the rest of them growing with every riding lesson she completed. Hated his mother’s perverse pride in his sister’s disdain of them, regarding it as a victory that they’d brought up a child who had learned to patronise and loathe them, simply for their working-class status.
Jackie had her Georgian New Town home and her country place up in Deeside, her successful husband and her polite, Merchant School kids. It was her life and as far as he was concerned, she was welcome to it. But he sensed that Trudi was covetous of this status, like she believed Lennox was essentially made of the same stuff, and with her scalpel-like love she could scrape off the bad bits and put this career policeman back on the right track.
While Jackie was on horseback, Lennox and his mate Les Brodie would cycle everywhere. Told to stay off the main roads, they’d take their bikes to Colinton Dell, along the path through the woods by the river, into the darkened mouth of that old stone tunnel.
Lennox suddenly blenches as something spins past his face. His heartbeat normalises: three kids are throwing a Frisbee around in the parking lot, as their mother loads up the car with groceries.
— Sorry, sir, says one fresh-faced, skinny wee boy. With his eager but sad puppy eyes, he’s the sort of kid, Lennox considers, who will always invoke a slight sense of pity, even outside of his melancholy thought stream. He picks up the disc and spins it at the boy, who catches it and throws it back to him with a light in his eye that indicates a bona fide game has started up. Lennox chucks it in Tianna’s direction, but she doesn’t move to intercept as it flies past her.
She wants to join in, but they’re just bone-headed kids. That’s what he told her:
And her childhood glided past her like the Frisbee, destined for the hands of another.
11 Road Trip
AS THE MAP shakes in his trembling, swollen hand, Lennox is simultaneously squeezed by the sense that he’s fucking up big time. Trying to drive while reading a Miami street plan and a Florida road map is inviting trouble. To his weary eyes the urban cartography is just badly printed lines of different colour: grid-like black, some reds, a few blues and the odd green. The print is so small he can barely decipher it. What did it all mean? He’s discomforted to find himself driving west on Highway 41, away from his intended route, the 75 Interstate they called Alligator Alley. Worse, it seems to take him back through the district they were fleeing from, where Robyn and Tianna lived. She’s stiff in the passenger seat, back into that silent world to which he’s denied access.
All he can do is keep going west. The two to three hours to get to Bologna on the interstate will be longer on Highway 41, the Tamiami Trail. It comes upon them bearing its frustrating announcement of a fifty-five miles- per-hour speed limit, as a median barrier of aluminium, dispassionately bearing the scars of accidents past, splits the concrete lanes of the highway.
Lennox is surprised how quickly and resoundingly the outskirts of Miami become the swamps of the Everglades. Birds of prey he has never seen before, like giant crows cross-bred with hawks, hover above. Many are splattered beneath the wheels, scavenging for roadkill and ending up victims themselves, smearing the highway in varying degrees of pulverisation. Some forested areas are decimated by what Lennox assumes to be hurricane damage. Trees are bent, buckled and wilted as if warped under intense heat rather than wind, and areas of perimeter fence are ripped aside. In the swamp big white cranes hang unfeasibly in threadbare trees, making him think again of Les and the seagulls.
Tianna has redeemed her old set of baseball cards and is counting them.
— You like these cards, eh. Do ye collect them?
— Uh-uh. I jus keep these ones. They were my daddy’s. She regards him through the shield of her hair, waiting to see his reaction. — They ain’t worth nothin but he did have some valuable ones. Do y’all like baseball?
— Not really. To be honest, I’m not mad keen on American sports. I mean, baseball’s just rounders, a bairn’s game, he scoffs, before realising her age. — I mean tae say, there was never a Scotsman who played baseball!
— Oh yeah? Tianna challenges, handing him a card.
BOBBY THOMSON
(b: October 23, 1923, Glasgow, Scotland)
264 home runs in 14 seasons. Famous for the winning ‘shot heard around the world’, which won the National League pennant for the New York Giants against the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1951.
The ‘Staten Island Scot’ was the youngest in a family of six who immigrated to the USA in his childhood. He played for the Giants, Braves, Cubs, Red Sox and Orioles. Now retired, he lives in Savannah, Georgia.
