A glower. Bite of lower lip. The saggy jowls started to tremble as Fitz stoked himself for another display of dramatics. ‘Dury, yer pushing yer feckin’ luck.’
I raised myself from the bench. ‘Can you run a search for a white Corrado, address likely as not in Sighthill?’
There was a bit of a nod. He didn’t look too fazed by the suggestion. I pressed my luck further. ‘If there’s a file on the owner, it’d be good to get a look at it too.’
‘Are ye off yer feckin’ head, Dury?’ His face coloured round the edges; his mouth slit into a crease. ‘I can’t go putting yer every hunch through the system without good reason.’
I moved forwards, faced him, said, ‘Here’s one, then — your wife’s lovely garden.’
He went white. ‘I’ll feckin’ do for ye one of these days, boyo. I swear, I swear…’
I put my hands in my pockets, spoke softly: ‘Fitz, pull your head in. You’re in your heart-attack years — don’t give yourself a coronary.’
He waved a fist at me. His knuckles were white now as well. ‘Dury, what I will do is give ye some good advice, for free, mind: watch yer feckin’ back!’
I smiled, said, ‘I do that anyway.’
‘I mean close to home… Your ex is on the other side now. Remember that.’
Chapter 24
I awoke in utter blackness. Beyond dark. Felt like Gregor Samsa from Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’. Remember the one? Gregor opens his eyes one morning to find he’s been transformed into an insect. His family outside are banging on the door telling him to get up, get out, get to work. Gregor, however, is too busy struggling with his numerous legs and new, hard, armour-plated bulk. When I remember this story, the part that strikes hardest is that Gregor’s room, his surroundings, the world he knows, remain unchanged. It’s him alone that’s been altered, fucked up. The world is indifferent.
As I lay staring into the darkness, I knew I was in a world of shit. And it was mine alone. A personal hell I’d devised for myself. I was trapped in my very own insect body. I couldn’t move. I felt swaying beneath me, all around, but I was paralysed.
Was it fear?
Was it panic?
Anger turned in?
Worse — it was all of the above. I felt trapped.
I’d read Kafka endlessly as a teenager. Right into my twenties and thirties I’d always picked up the latest biographies. He was a man who knew suffering. Not like mine, not self-inflicted. But suffering is suffering and I understood Kafka right from an early age.
I’d once read he had asked to have his stomach pumped, purely because he ‘had a feeling disgusting things would come out’.
I empathised with that kind of self-loathing.
I’d memorised these words of Kafka’s: ‘God knows how I can possibly feel any more pain, since in my sheer urgency to inflict it upon myself I never get round to perceiving it.’ I must have read that passage a thousand times. Always with a sense of sorrow and, dangerously, identification. I identified with Kafka’s pain. He knew he had an illness and it would kill him. I did too.
Lately I’d seen my thoughts go way beyond their usual angry depression. I was nudging despair. The kind that has only one conclusion. Like Kafka I thought, God knows how I can possibly feel any more pain…
I lay for an hour until light started to stream through the small windows of Hod’s boat. I’d made the decision to move out of the Holy Wall whilst plod had a tail on me. I figured the boat would be the best bet. Hod had warned me about people having difficulties sleeping in the swaying berth. I’d set him straight on that score: when you’re an alcoholic, the swaying bed is something you get used to pretty early on. It’s when the bed doesn’t sway that you have difficulties.
I rose and showered in the small cabin. The water was tepid. Scrub that, the water was cold. The all-over shivers came afterwards, but again these were something I could live with. Another byproduct of my particular disease that I was well and truly used to.
I dressed in a grey marl T-shirt, one of Gap’s finest. It had the little pocket on the breast just perfect for a pack of smokes. I finished the look with a pair of navy Dockers and my Docs, which I’d scrubbed clean of Tam Fulton’s blood. There was a bit of a nip in the air so I borrowed a Berghaus windcheater from the back of the cabin door whilst I heated up the stove and got some coffee going. It was instant but better than I was used to. It tasted like the three-pound-a-cup jobs from up the road. In this part of the city, by the marina on the shore, it was millionaire central.
When I was a lad, kicking about in Leith, my brother and I thought a millionaire was someone you read about in books. The thought of my actually meeting a millionaire back then was on a par with meeting a Tyrannosaurus rex. To look around now at the number of yachts and Porsches in our small city numbed my mind better than a bottle and a half of Wild Turkey. Some people were doing very well out of the gang rape Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown had inflicted on this country. The flip side, of course, was some were headed exactly the opposite way.
I knew I was close to home and I felt a pressing need to check on my mother. She was older now, and looking frail the last time we had met. I didn’t think she was handling my father’s death well; she should have been relieved, singing from the rooftops. I knew I was. But my mother was a very different person to me: she could forgive.
I made a phone call.
Ringing.
A young male voice: ‘Aye-aye.’
‘Who’s this?’ I demanded.
‘Barry. How, who the fuck are you?’
It was my nephew. I recognised the name but it had been more than a few years since I’d seen hide or hair of my sister’s boys. They had always been spoilt; it didn’t sound like the years had improved this one any.
‘Gus. What are you doing using language like that on your grandmother’s phone?’
He slammed the receiver down on the table. I heard him banging on a door and hollering at my mother. I was beyond enraged. ‘Hello… hello…’
It took several minutes for my mother to come to the telephone.
‘Hello,’ she said. Her voice was strained, bereft of emotion, energy.
‘Mam, you sound terrible.’
A cough. I heard her reaching for her asthma inhaler. ‘I’m fine.’
‘Clearly you’re not… Are you back on the inhaler?’ She hadn’t used it for years; I knew she was stressed.
‘I just had a wee turn there and-’
I did not want to hear this. Pelted her with questions: ‘Mam, are you okay now? Should I come round?’
She was quick to respond. ‘No, no… I’m fine, Angus.’
‘Is Catherine with you?’
‘Och, no… just the boys, I’m looking after the boys.’
The boys were old enough to look after themselves. Christ alone knew what they were doing there. ‘Catherine’s lads must be sixteen now, Mam.’
Silence.
I worried about that.
‘Mam, I’m staying nearby… I’ll pay you a wee visit soon.’
‘No, Angus.’ She sounded fearful. ‘Don’t do that.’
I heard her reach for the inhaler again. I didn’t want to upset her any more. ‘Okay, okay. Just look after yourself, Mam.’
She calmed. ‘I will. I will.’
