real spark for Michael making something of himself… He was still trucking then, was halfway across Europe when we got a call to rush Jayne to the hospital. We were on standby, so to speak, we drove her in the back of the car.’ Now I smiled at the recollection. ‘She was so bloody big, like a house. We could hardly get her through the door of the car… Debs sat with her on the back seat, doing the breathing exercises.’
I stopped to savour the memory. My eyes misted.
A prompt: ‘And you drove the car to the hospital?’
‘Yeah, yeah, I did that…’ I remembered pacing the corridor. A nurse had asked me if I was the father and I had had to explain that Michael wasn’t coming. I remembered the way Debs had lowered her head when the nurse asked me; she was wounded. I stopped smiling.
‘Was it a simple birth?’
‘No, not at all… Christ, I must have emptied that coffee machine, we were there all night. They put off doing a Caesarean for hours but in the end Jayne was so weak that they had no choice.’ The moment we were called into the ward still lived in me: Jayne was almost too drugged to hold baby Alice, her head was lolling from side to side and Debs had to put her hand underneath to support it. We couldn’t believe the black hair on her, thick, thick black hair. When Debs took Alice in her arms they looked so similar that they could have been mother and child. We both had so much love for her that it felt as if she was ours. Jayne looked exhausted but she had enough energy to cry — we all knew why.
‘How did you feel when you held your niece for the first time?’ said Dr Naughton.
My throat seized, my eyes filled and I knew if I moved my head, even slightly, tears would fall. ‘I felt joy…’ I said, ‘real joy… and the most incredible pain that my wife would never hold our own child.’
Chapter 29
Debs had left a note stating she’d gone to stay with her friend Susan.
‘Just… great.’
Susan would not be talking me up — we shared a mutual antipathy. The note was brief, said she’d taken the dog because he needed looking after and ‘You have enough to do mending yourself, Gus.’
Debs claimed she wanted to give me some space, that I needed to think.
‘Fuck that!’
Thinking was the last thing I needed more of right now. I knew why Debs had left, couldn’t fault her for it, but it still felled me. I just couldn’t expect her to stick around while I delved into my brother’s murder. Way things were shaping up, she was safer out if it.
I stormed to the bathroom and kicked off the cistern. It flew in the air, made a one-eighty then clattered off the sink, splitting in two. I fired into the speed wraps and took myself back to the living room. As my heart rate increased I immediately felt panic settle on me. The flat was silent and cold, empty. I paced to the bedroom. Debs had cleaned out her make-up and styling products. A small wheeled suitcase that usually sat on top of the wardrobe had been taken and her dressing gown no longer hung on the back of the door. The room seemed to have changed very little, but what had altered was seismic. I loped back to the living room in a daze, sat on the couch. I looked through to the space we’d cleared under the kitchenette counter for Usual’s basket. It was gone.
A throbbing started in my temples. I put my fingers around my skull and squeezed.
‘This isn’t happening,’ I told myself; but I knew it was.
I picked up Debs’s note and read it through again. She’d left the number for Susan’s house. It seemed such a strange thing to do when we all had mobiles nowadays. As I thought it through I sussed she was trying to say I could still contact her, she’d still speak to me. At least I hoped that’s what she meant; maybe I was being optimistic.
I got up and made myself a coffee, tried to buy off my shrieking brain with caffeine. Didn’t work. I found myself back on the couch looking through Debs’s Cranberries CDs and wondering what the hell I should do next. Nothing I’d tried so far seemed the right move. I was sure the shrink had made me feel worse, raked up old hurts. I wondered if there would ever be a future for Debs and me. It just seemed like the world was against it. We’d tried so many times to make it work but it always ended the same way — with me hurting her. I felt ashamed at the realisation.
I held my head in my hands once again, then my phone rang. The noise broke through the desolation of the flat.
I dived up to grab it from the mantel.
‘Hello…’
‘Ah, Dury, ’tis yer bold self.’
‘Fitz.’
‘Ye sound disappointed… Who were ye expecting, Angelina Jolie?’ He laughed at himself. I wondered if he had a drink in him.
‘What do you want?’
A harrumph. ‘I was, er, thinking we might have a little, whatsit they say these days?… A catch-up.’
I remembered our last one: ‘Do I need a brief this time?’
He roared laughing. ‘Ah, Dury… yer some joker.’
I was deadly serious. ‘I’m not laughing.’
‘Okay, so… Look, I’m after clearing my desk of one or two items relating to your late brother’s unfortunate demise, and I was needing to return some of it. I thought I could let you have them, save disturbing others.’
I got the picture, said, ‘Yeah, fine. You want to meet the same place?’
‘Caff on the Mile… Can you be there in an hour?’
‘I’ll be there.’
Clicked off.
The auld wifey from number three was coming up the stairs as I walked out.
‘Hello, there,’ she said.
I nodded, had passed her with little recognition when she spoke up again. ‘Your wife told me about the poor dog.’
I stopped still, turned. ‘She’s not my wife.’ The words came out too harshly. ‘I mean, we’re not married.’
The wifey creased her mouth into a thin smile. ‘Well, the pair of you look made for each other… I’m sure there’ll be a big day soon.’
I didn’t know what to say, stumbled on the step.
She went on, ‘She’d make a beautiful bride. A bonnie-looking girl she is.’
I found my feet, managed, ‘I don’t deserve her.’
The truth, I knew, was that she didn’t deserve me.
The street looked as if it had just been dusted with icing sugar; another light snowfall had settled over the city. Footprints had started to erode the white covering on the pavement but the wider view was so bright it burned my eyes. I schlepped over the road at the Arc building and turned under the railway bridge. I bent into a chill wind that cut into my face and froze my jaw. I longed for winter to be over, for the temperature to rise and the sun to make an appearance again. Even the weak Scottish one that shows too rarely, and when it does, not for long enough.
At the foot of the Mile a tartan shop had taken a break from blasting the street with teuchter music and had turned to Slade’s ‘Merry Christmas Everybody’ instead. I took a sketch in the window: the jolly kilted mannequin that spent his days drinking pretend whisky from a plastic tumbler had been strangled with a tinsel noose. He didn’t seem fazed — laughing it up same as ever — but he did stare out at the new parliament, which was a joke the year round.
In the caff some student bell-end in a Cossack’s hat danced before me in the queue. If he stood on my toe one more time he’d get a taste of my own footwork in his coal-hole. I was in no mood to indulge some Tarquin who was slumming it with the proles because mammy and daddy had cut back on his gin money during the economic crisis.
I tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Excuse me.’
