and take a swatch at the place.’
I hadn’t ventured into the Wall since I sold up. Sounded like Hod’d turned it into — the worst of things — a style bar. Just the thought of trendies in Jimmy Choos laying waste to my memories of the place had me about chucking up, said, ‘Maybe later.’
Mac got out the car, bent over the door. ‘Move on, Gus. Stop living in the past.’
Felt content where I was, didn’t see anything so fucking great about the present, or any future to come for that matter. Went Judge Judy, said, ‘Whatever.’
‘I’m serious, mate… Come down later, Hod’ll be rapt to see you.’
I knew he was right. Hod was my oldest mate and I’d good as blanked him because of this pub. I still felt sore that I’d lost it — Col had left it to me in his will. I said, ‘Aye, okay. Soon, promise.’
Mac thinned his lips. Wasn’t buying any of it. He closed the car door. Usual jumped into the vacated seat.
The drive home was slow, the traffic ponderous as the endless Edinburgh buses struggled with the elements. Snow and freezing temperatures did not go with double-deckers, hills, and lazy lard-ass drivers, all looking for an excuse to piss off anyone that crossed their route. They were an almost perfect symbol for the modern Scottish workforce: why devote your time to making the customer happy when it’s far more satisfying to make them miserable?
I got parked across from the shop where they sold the aquariums and exotic fish. The drains reeked round here, real bad. I’d caught a bloke tipping a bucketful of dead little fish down there once. My powers of deduction told me that it wasn’t a first.
Usual chanked it up the street, sat at the door to the stairwell. I tugged his ears as I reached the step, put the key in the door. Some jakey had taken another slash on the wall. I held my nose and waved the dog on. As I took the stairs I saw the old woman from across the way. I’d seen her a few times before. Never knew her name — Debs and I referred to her as the auld wifey at number three.
‘Hello there,’ I said. She was struggling with a couple of Iceland carrier bags. ‘Want me to get those for you?’
She beamed. ‘Oh, would you, son?’
My heart went up a gear; I pressed out a smile. ‘Surely.’ She had a great hand-knitted scarf wrapped around her neck, I think the term is Fair Isle. ‘That’s a fine knit there. You do that yourself?’
She was still a bit breathless after the few steps she’d taken. ‘Oh no, my late sister did this for me, many a long moon ago.’
I immediately felt the tragedy of her life; it seared into me. I felt my own age too — I’d now lost a brother. I carried up the bags and listened to the old woman tell me about her sister’s great talent for knitting. ‘I’ve a flat full of her jumpers and scarves. Each one is a memory, and you can’t have too many of those.’
I had no words for her. She took the bags from me and disappeared into her flat and her reverie. I felt my hurt rising, but I fought it. I wouldn’t let myself weaken. I turned and went into my flat. Took off my Crombie and removed the quarter-bottle of Grouse. I placed it on the coffee table and sat before it, staring.
I knew it would be so easy for me to open the whisky, neck the lot. I tasted the fire of it, running over my throat. I sensed the burn in the pit of my stomach as it landed. I felt the hum in my head that would come soon after, the hum that made it all worthwhile. I knew I was a trouble drinker because of that hum. Other people — normal people — drink for the taste, for the pleasure of it. I drank for the sensation, the effect. I drank to attain the hum in my head that said the louder noise outside had been deadened. The sound of reality, the world of living and breathing was drowned out by drinking.
I stared at the bottle, the little Grouse on the front, the low-flying burdie that we call it in jest. Would you like a low-flying burdie, Gus?
God, yes, would I ever.
Just to whet my thrapple.
Just one or two.
Just the ten.
Just a bucket, then.
I knew there was no safe number, not after one.
But I was tempted.
I picked up the bottle, held the cap between my thumb and forefinger; all it would take was one quick twist.
I fought it.
That’s what I’d done for so long now. One drink was too many, and after that, a thousand wouldn’t be enough.
When Debs had taken me back in, when we’d set up home together again, I’d vowed not to drink.
‘I don’t want you to do it for me,’ she said. ‘It’s got to be for you.’
I understood. I saw where she was coming from. The change had to come from within. I’d done the one thing I had thought I never would. Went to the one place I had previously laughed off all suggestions I go: Alcoholics Anonymous.
Was I an alcoholic?
Did I know what it meant?
That’s what they’d asked me.
I read every description I could find. None of them seemed to fit me, but in every one of them there was something that fitted me. I admitted defeat.
‘My name’s Gus Dury and I’m an alcoholic.’ I said the words, but it was all meaningless to me. It was all ritual. I sat through their meeting, listened to their plaintive, whining tales of woe. Poor me, poor me, poor me a drink!
It churned my stomach.
I wasn’t like them.
They were weak. They were the societal chaff. The dregs. The limp-willed. Losers. All with a sob story of how they got into such a mess. How they just couldn’t stop themselves. How they needed AA to keep them on the straight and narrow.
My relationship with the sauce wasn’t about support. Or substitution. Or lassitude born of a hard life. I drank because I wanted to. And now I stopped because I wanted to, I told myself.
It was a simple pay-off. I could stop when I wanted and I could start again when I wanted. I controlled it; it didn’t control me. To admit the opposite was to give up on the game of life.
I put the bottle back in my coat pocket. I was exhausted. I thought to grab a wrap of speed, but I’d left the lot in the car. I knew I was too hyped for sleep. My mind was awash with thoughts of Michael and of the police investigation, of fat Davie Prentice and of a dose of Czech workers, and one Czech lodger.
I needed to unwind.
I ran a bath. Climbed in.
I was soon far enough gone to feel my mind pull up to its new preoccupations. Nothing was fitting into place. If this was a jigsaw, I wouldn’t have more than a couple of pieces stuck together. Sure, there was something going on at the factory — Davie’s denials, and the sight of Vilem lording it about, only confirmed my suspicions. That angry worker, Kerr fella, might turn up some answers when we gave him a knock but I wasn’t hopeful; had my suspicions he’d be given a good few reasons to keep schtum.
I leaned out of the bath, grabbed over my tabs that I’d sat by the sink. I lit a red-top, caught the familiar Marlboro stench.
Davie Prentice was, for sure, as wide as a gate. But I didn’t have him down as a killer. Taking up that kind of damage took bottle and fat Davie had none of that. The suggestion that he might even be mixed up with someone who had the cobblers required to put a bullet in a man didn’t square with the devout coward I knew him to be. If Davie Prentice was mixed up in my brother’s murder, he was being fucked over too, worse than any Calton Hill rent boy.
I turned the sum of my thoughts over to my subconscious, zoned out in the warm water. In no time I was comatose, dead to the world.
Had been crashed out for God knows how long when I got jerked back to reality. The bathroom was in
