My Life as a Man E-Book

Frederic Lindsay

• Herausgeber: Polygon
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 343

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

When factory owner Bernard Morton fires him from his first job, Harry Glass protests by impulsively going off with Morton's car and the intriguing Mrs Morton. Shocked out of the life she has been living, Mrs Morton forms a bond with Harry as they are pursued from one city to another with the Morton brothers in pursuit. Bernard wants his wife back; Norman is more concerned with the contents of a briefcase left in the car boot. When Harry and Mrs Morton are given shelter in a remote house in the Highlands, it seems they have found refuge. But by the time the Morton brothers find them they have been caught up in a world of sexual perversity and fantasy. My Life as a Man begins with a nation in the grip of anti-war fever, and ends with an old man's discovery that life can still surprise him.

Leseprobe

My Life as a Man

First published in Great Britain in 2006 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

This ebook edition published in 2012 by Birlinn Limited West Newington House Newington Road Edinburgh EH9 1QSwww.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © Frederic Lindsay, 2006

The moral rights of Frederic Lindsay to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-221-4 Print ISBN: 978-1-904598-72-5

Version 1.0

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

BOOK ONE

CHAPTER TWO

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

BOOK THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

BOOK FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

The day my wife died, 15 February 2003, turned out to be an exceptional day of winter sunshine. It was a day to enjoy the harmless pleasures of self-congratulation: sit in the conservatory, admire the garden and decide we hadn’t done too badly with our lives. We’d been married a long time. That morning, though, Eileen had a different idea.

‘I want you to go on the demonstration,’ she said.

I knew at once what she was talking about. The previous day’s papers had been full of them, demonstrations all over the world, and today Glasgow was having its very own.

‘What’s it got to do with us?’ I wondered. ‘Let them all get on with it.’

‘I’d go myself,’ she said, ‘if I was able.’

She was in bed, on her lap the breakfast tray I’d brought up to her. We’d spent the previous afternoon in the park at Rouken Glen. We’d walked hand in hand, though normally she didn’t like holding hands in public. Maybe we’d walked too far, but the weather had been fine that day, too. Today she was tired.

‘It’s not the kind of thing we do,’ I said. ‘What do we care about politics?’

‘It’s time we cared. When you think there are boys now giving the Nazi salute – even in Russia! – it breaks my heart. Have they no memory?’ She stared at me. ‘What is there to smile at in that?’

‘Something just came into my head. Tony, my best friend at school, his wee brother ate a banana with its skin on. Just after the war. He’d never seen one before. The things you remember, eh?’

‘You’re a silly man,’ she said.

‘But I made you smile. I don’t want you brooding on ancient history and stuff like that.’ Concentration camps again in Europe. Skeletons behind barbed wire again. Maybe even butchers with tears in their eyes listening to Brahms. ‘Not on a day like this. We could walk round the garden with a glass of wine after lunch.’

‘Oh, the garden,’ she said sardonically.

I smiled at her. ‘We’re a nation of two.’

‘Like Switzerland?’

‘There are worse countries to be.’

Her hair was white and she had wrinkles on her face, but sometimes when I looked at her I didn’t just see her as a young woman, I saw the girl she must have been long before we met. She had surprised me and I was moved and impressed. She was almost ninety, but her heart was younger than mine for she still cared about the world.

‘Do you ever think of August and Beate?’ she asked.

I was startled. In all these years, we had never spoken of them.

‘Hardly ever,’ I said.

It wasn’t a lie, though for a long time it would have been.

‘That night we ran away from them, I shouldn’t have stopped you from seeing,’ she said.

‘Whatever it was they were doing, God help them, we could probably watch worse now on television,’ I said. ‘Nothing’s censored now.’ I wanted to make her smile, change the subject, anything but this talk of the past.

‘I know you’ve thought about it,’ she said.

‘Not for a long time.’

‘It would have been better to see what happened that night. Maybe if you had, that would have been the end of it. You’d have thought less about it if you’d seen.’

That she could make me feel guilty was ridiculous. I wasn’t a child caught masturbating, the pink balloon of an adult’s face above bedclothes thrown back.

Managing a smile, I asked, ‘Is that why I am to go and demonstrate?’

‘Please,’ she said quietly. She knew I was angry. I couldn’t hide anything from her.

‘If it means that much to you, I’ll go,’ I said. ‘Even if I have to go alone.’

‘I’ll be with you in spirit,’ she said.

The sunshine was bad luck for Tony Blair, the prime minister. By the time I got to Glasgow Green, where the peace march was scheduled to start, a great crowd was already assembling. Some people like crowds. I’m not fond of them, not even on the pavements of Argyle Street or Sauchiehall Street in the middle of a Saturday afternoon, though I’d kept Eileen company in the days when she enjoyed the bustle.

It was a good-natured crowd. Sunshine does that. It makes you feel good, brightening the colours of women’s coats, burnishing the stone of the old buildings, warm on your cheek or the back of your neck. Feeling good about themselves, too, that makes people happy; all of them sure that they were doing the right thing, which as it happened I didn’t feel certain about at all.

‘Coming along was my wife’s idea,’ I told Tom and Margaret, a couple I’d just met. The three of us had exchanged names in a kind of holiday mood. ‘She feels strongly that going to war is wrong.’

They both spoke at once.

He asked, ‘So how do you feel about it?’

She asked, ‘Your wife isn’t here? I hope she’s not ill?’

To her, I said, ‘Oh, no, no. She keeps good health, but the walk would be too much for her.’

She gave me a shrewd look. At a guess, she and her husband and I were all about the same age, somewhere in the late sixties. All presumably, as I’d claimed for my wife, in good health; all able to walk the few miles from the rallying point to the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre, outside which the demonstration would be held, while inside the Scottish Labour Party was holding its spring conference.

Now the crowd was drifting steadily forward. We filled two paths and the police were letting people through to join the procession first from one path, then the other. When they let us through, I looked at my watch and it was quarter past eleven. Walking along in the sunshine, I felt caught up in something bigger than myself. It was strange to feel safe in the middle of such a crowd. On the way, Tom – for the three of us had stayed together – suggested that we should turn aside to buy something to eat. It was foolish but none of us had thought of what to do for our lunch. Margaret spotted a café and we went in and bought filled rolls and I bought lemonade; they had brought a bottle of water with them, though they hadn’t any food.

By the time we got to the gates of the Centre, it was just before two o’clock. We found a place on a grass bank above the car park. The crowd had been gathered into two of the car parks in front of the Centre; there were plenty of other parks for cars. I looked from the building ahead, its roofs folded one on top of the other like the scales on an armadillo, to the tower behind us that led down into the walkway under the Clyde. We shared the last of the rolls – cheese and pickle, coronation chicken, ham and tomato – and sipped lemonade out of the bottle.

‘Look,’ Tom said, ‘they’ve got sound equipment after all.’

I said it was what I’d have expected, two big speakers, set up one on either side of the platform.

‘Thing is,’ Margaret said, ‘Labour refused to let them use a PA system.’

‘How could they do that? What has the Labour Party to do with the car parks?’

‘The council owns the SECC,’ Tom said.

He waited till the penny dropped, and then grinned. The Labour Party has run Glasgow for ever, it seems.

‘Well, they must have changed their mind,’ I said. ‘You can see the speakers.’

‘Or had it changed for them,’ Margaret said. ‘There was a demonstration a week ago, and they were told that not to have a PA system wouldn’t be safe.’

‘We got a leaflet about it,’ Tom said, ‘from CND a week ago.’

‘CND?’ I said.

‘Ageing hippies, that’s us,’ Tom said. ‘I know.’

Across the murmur of the crowd, the sound system carried the voice of a man who’d been introduced as a councillor. ‘I’ve just been told the police estimate there are twenty-seven thousand people here. Well, all I can say is, the Glasgow police cannae count!’

‘Right enough,’ Tom said. ‘Comparing this with the big football crowds they used to get, I’d say there was three times that. Maybe more.’

After that we listened for a while to the voices booming from the little figures on the platform. John Swinney, leader of the SNP, talked about the need for a UN resolution; a man from the TUC spoke, and then the leader of the Fire Brigades Union. Like the preacher and sin, all of them it seemed were against going to war in Iraq. After about an hour, the voices got fainter, as if the address system was using batteries and they were running down. By the time it got to Tommy Sheridan, the Socialist leader, you couldn’t make out what he was saying, though even at a distance you could tell he cared, which made me envy him. Nice to feel that anything mattered that much.

By this time, it was about three o’clock and Margaret said her back was sore with standing. There didn’t seem anything to stay for, though as we left people were still streaming into the car parks. It was good to be strolling along on a fine afternoon, it still felt like being part of a crowd. Somewhere up ahead there was a guy with a trombone and every so often he gave us a tune.

‘Pity about the Jericho Rumpus,’ Tom said.

‘Is that what he’s playing?’

‘What?’

‘The guy with the trombone.’

Tom smiled reluctantly. It was Margaret who realised I wasn’t trying to be funny. Truth is, I’m tone-deaf; I was willing to believe anything.

‘Everybody was supposed to bring something to make a noise,’ she said. ‘Pans, drums, whatever. The rumpus would start up about half past one and the idea was that Blair would hear it inside the hall while he was speaking.’

‘Except that he changed the time. They got his speech before they’d digested their ham and eggs, and by eleven in the morning he was on his way back to London.’

By the time we’d walked all the way into Argyle Street it was after four o’clock. With all that fresh air, they were hungry and decided to go into the café in Woolworth’s for something to eat before they caught the bus home to East Kilbride. I don’t know why I went with them. I was hungry, of course, from the fresh air, but I wasn’t all that far from home. Truth is, I’d enjoyed the excitement of the day, the bustle. We led a quiet life, Eileen and I.

They got fish and chips and a pot of tea. I was tempted but I stuck to coffee and a piece of cake.

When we were settled at a table, Tom said, ‘You know what I was thinking as we were coming back along the road there?’ He shook his head. ‘I was thinking, we never learn. From Aldermaston on, doesn’t matter how big the crowd is, the government does what it wants.’

‘That’s no excuse for not trying,’ Margaret said.

‘Maybe it’s time to hang up our boots,’ Tom said. ‘Leave it to the younger folk.’

‘Anything for an argument. You know fine it’ll always be worth trying for the children’s sake,’ his wife said. I realised from the sharing quality of her smile that she assumed I had children, too. I didn’t correct her.

‘Maybe human beings are too stupid to worry about.’

‘That’s a terrible thing to say!’

‘And there’s no sauce,’ Tom said. He got up and went back to the counter.

‘He’s a worrier,’ Margaret said. ‘If it wasn’t this, it would be global warming. Sitting brooding’s no good for you. You have to get out and do something. Isn’t that right?’

‘To be honest with you, this is the first time I’ve ever been on any kind of march,’ I told her. ‘I’m not what you’d call a political animal. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for my wife.’

‘It’s often the way. It’s natural for a woman to care more than a man.’

I wasn’t sure how true that was, but didn’t feel strongly enough to argue about it.

Tom came back with a bottle of tomato sauce. He banged the bottom of it a couple of times to put some on the edge of his plate.

‘Harry says he’s never been on a demonstration before,’ his wife told him.

‘It’s amazing how many people are the same,’ he said. ‘First-timers like you. I’ve been puzzling my head to think why. Why do people care so much about whether or not we go to war with Iraq? I’m not talking about the usual suspects like Margaret and me.’ Abstractedly, he took his wife by the hand, a public gesture of affection which seemed to startle her. ‘Or the ones who’d turn out for anything as long as it was anti-American. But we’re being told there are a million people on the streets down in London and millions more in France and Germany and Italy and all over the world. Why is that? Do you know what I think? It’s the millennium.’

‘It can’t just be that going to war is wrong?’ his wife said.

‘That, of course,’ he said with a touch of impatience. ‘But the sheer scale of all that’s been happening.’ He shook his head again. ‘No, I think people wanted things to be different with the end of the Cold War. We’d all been frightened for so long: waiting for the end of the world. And then the Berlin Wall came down and just for a year or two everything looked better. I think all of this’ – he waved a hand as if the crowded pavements outside were part of the same great demonstration – ‘is pure disappointment. It’s saying, I know we can’t stop the madness, but we can tell history we didn’t like where we were going. It’s one way of saying sorry to the future.’

‘To the children,’ his wife said.

Their sincerity made me uncomfortable. ‘Time for me to be getting off home,’ I said. ‘The wife’ll be wanting to know how it all went.’

‘Tell her it was worth it,’ Margaret said.

It wasn’t often now that I travelled on a bus, and so I enjoyed sitting on the top deck on the way home. I watched the tenements fall behind and saw the tall blocks of the high-rises in the distance, and remembered my boyhood in a room and kitchen and later in one of the houses in the schemes they’d built after the war to decant the poor out of their poverty; the excitement of having an inside lavatory and a bathroom and a garden at the back. And now I was going home to a house, bought after we got up the courage to come back to Glasgow, with a wall at the side that enclosed a garage and a yard behind it and a hedge and a lawn and another hedge and a garden of roses right at the end. We’d lived there ever since, happily, oh, ideally happily, though we had acquired from that terrible time with August and Beate a habit of holding our breath and we continued to hold it even when there was no need, as if only by keeping still would we be safe. And so all the causes and the politics and what people marched and demonstrated about had passed us by, and it only occurred to me as late as this that it might have been for my sake, not hers.

Quarter of an hour later I was stretched on the floor beside her. She must have got up to tidy the tray away. A plate and a broken cup were by the wall where they had been thrown from her as she fell. All day she must have been alone there while the crowds were gathering, while the speeches were being made, while I walked in the sun. I clasped her hand with its poor bent fingers and waited as if she might open her eyes, though I knew she never would or ever could again. The curtain was drawn still against the morning and in that shadowy light all the days I had lived became one as I lay bereft.

BOOK ONE

CHAPTER TWO

When I was a child, my father, Tommy Glass, drove things for a living. A long-distance lorry driver for a while, he gave that up so he could be home more. It’s funny the way things work out. He got a job on the docks, and when the war came that meant he was in a reserved occupation. This night I’m thinking of, he came home with an armful of books. As he set them down on the kitchen table, he must have asked where my mother was. Stupid question: she didn’t share her plans with me any more than she did with him. I’m talking now of years ago and so I can’t remember exactly how I pointed that out – ‘I don’t know where she is,’ said with a scowl, I’d guess; not knowing yet how lucky I was to have him there – but I remember his answer. ‘Who’s “she”?’ he asked. Not that he didn’t know, but he thought it was disrespectful of me at eleven to say ‘she’ instead of ‘Mummy’.

He liked to cook, so there was one way I was lucky with him. He didn’t have a big range: fish and chips, toasted cheese with a poached egg on top, scrambled eggs, mince and tatties. As for what he made that night, that’s gone; not that it could possibly matter, though I’ve tried to remember. Probably not the mince and tatties: cooked up in a pot with turnip and carrots, that took time, and his detour up Maryhill Road to the library had made him late. Whatever it was, it would have been good; everything he made tasted good. But I shoved my plate away, maybe took a mouthful or two, maybe stirred my fork round in it, for sure shoved the plate away. I remember the way he looked at me when I did that. I should have been hungry. I’d been alone in the house since four o’clock. Chances are there would have been bread and jam; probably I’d stuffed myself on bread and jam.

He ate one-handed while he read. I stayed at the table even though I wasn’t eating. When I caught him glancing up at me, he nodded at the pile of books and said, ‘Anything there you fancy?’

And he meant anything, though every one of them was out of the adult library. I could look through whatever was there, no rhyme or reason to what he chose, not that I could see, all kinds of books caught his eye. Often, impatient, he’d pick up and lay down book after book, so that all of them went back unfinished. I used to wonder what he could be searching for that was so hard to find.

‘No,’ I said.

‘You haven’t looked.’

‘I don’t need to. It’ll be rubbish.’

‘Where have I heard that before?’ It was a word my mother used a lot. Shaking his head, he went on before I could open my mouth. ‘Found another one about King Arthur.’

‘We’ve finished with him.’

‘So what’s your teacher got you on now? I’ll look next time I’m in the library.’

‘Nothing.’ Why was I angry? Maybe I was tired of coming into an empty house.

He pulled out a book from the pile and turned it so I could see the cover.

‘I was on my way out when I spotted it on the returns shelf. Don’t know what it’s like, but they’re all in there, Arthur, Gawain, Lancelot, sitting around in their tin underwear waiting for a knock at the door to go off on an adventure.’ He pushed it over to me. ‘Have a look, Harry.’

I pushed it back without a glance and got up to put on the wireless, too loud, I expect; that was a bad habit of mine. I’m pretty sure he sat on, reading at the table. What I remember is waking up during the night with the noise of the outside door slamming shut. Lying in the dark in the recess bed in the kitchen, I heard my father’s voice in the lobby and then my mother answering him. The voices weren’t angry or loud, and listening to them I fell asleep again. As usual, by the time I was up in the morning he’d gone to work.

When I got back from school, I looked in the bedroom, half expecting to see my mother hitched up on the pillow with a cup of tea, and a fag in her mouth, but there was only a tangle of blankets on the empty bed. In the kitchen, I made myself a piece and jam, took my father’s seat at the table and picked up the book he’d left there for me. Because of the crown on his head, you could tell which one was supposed to be Arthur in the picture on the cover. He looked older than the others, and as if he had a lot on his mind. Lancelot was easy, too, long blond hair surrounded by light as if someone had left a door open to the sun. The book was too old for me, not a book of stories at all. Like a penance, I persisted with it, until I was left with a handful of words: medieval, chivalry, and in a footnote The Romance of the Rose. The main thing was that I’d looked at it. I wanted to be able to tell my father when he came home that I’d looked at it; but he didn’t come home, not that night or any other. Later we heard that he’d given up working on the docks, and then that he’d been called up. For a while, every time I walked past Maryhill Barracks I wondered if he was somewhere on the other side of the high wall with its ugly shards of broken glass.

My mother said he must have been planning to leave. ‘He wouldn’t have the guts to say anything to me about meeting another woman. I should never have agreed to marry him. When I told him I was pregnant, “Marry me, Nettie,” he said, and like a fool I did.’

She went on like that for years afterwards, whenever she thought of it. I learned not to argue about it, but no one else ever said anything about him being with another woman, and if he’d been planning to leave us what kind of sense did it make that he’d brought home all those books that night, and among them one for me? Why would he have done that?

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER THREE

Monday morning the new job made a reason to get up. I almost didn’t, though, which as things turned out would have been a pity. Most mornings I lay until the bang of the front door signalled I would have the house to myself. That would be somewhere around half eight and I’d get up and scrounge for breakfast, bread and something to put on it, a cup of tea.

When I went barefoot into the kitchen, he was in his underpants at the sink filling the kettle. His name was Alec Turner, though I thought of him as the Hairy Bastard, and we’d shared the house since my mother walked out on him a year earlier, when I was seventeen.

‘What happened to you? You fall out of bed?’

‘You might have given me a shout,’ I complained. ‘I’m starting work this morning.’

He gave me a look that would have soured milk and went out without saying anything. I was on my second cup of tea when he came back, opened the cupboard under the sink and started to scratch around in the rubbish pail.

‘What do you call that?’ Down on his hunkers, holding it up at the stretch of his arm to stick it under my nose.

‘What would you call it?’ I asked.

‘I’d call it empty. That was for my supper last night.’

‘Oh, aye.’ There didn’t seem anything to say to that. I put the kettle on the ring and lit the gas.

‘You listening to me, Harry?’ He smelled of bed sweat and sweet aftershave in the morning. It was a smell I’d hated since at fourteen I’d seen him for the first time and realised my mother must have brought him back with her from the dancing the night before.

‘Are you listening to me, you wee shit?’

When I turned round, I was looking down on his bald patch. Hair everywhere else, not only on his chest, but a pelt of it on his back and little tufts on the back of his fingers. Plus smell. Not that he wasn’t clean enough; no aroma of piss, nothing like that. Jungly smell. Maybe it went with being such a hairy bastard. Me Tarzan, you Nettie.

‘I want you out of here, boy.’

‘Where am I supposed to go?’

‘You should have thought of that.’

‘Before I ate your bloody corned beef?’ That came out wrong, with a wee touch of panic, not tough at all. He’d given me crap before about throwing me out, but this time was different. It’s odd how I knew that right away.

He’d been palming a key for the front door and now he slid it into sight with his thumb, tricky as a conjuror. Mine had been on top of my jacket on a chair beside the bed, ready to pick up on my way out. When I went to check, it wasn’t there. And he’d dumped everything out of the drawers all over the bed.

‘You’ve ten minutes to pack,’ he said, following me in.

When I’d finished, I looked at the shelf of books. You can’t carry a shelf of books on your back. One, though? Maybe two? There were some it would hurt me to leave. And what about the library books? Something to remember me by. Getting postcards about fines would drive him crazy.

‘What’s the fucking joke?’ he asked. ‘Your head’s never out of a book or stuck up your arse. You’re useless. From now on, boy, you’re in the real world and I’ll tell you what chance you’ve got. No chance, you’ve got no chance.’

‘I’ll tell you one thing I’ve got, I’ve got a job,’ I said. He didn’t break into applause, just sneered and shook his head. ‘Mr Simpson put me on to it, the one that did careers when I was at North Kelvinside. I met him in the street, and he asked me what I was doing.’ You could have made more of yourself, he’d told me.

‘Schoolteacher arsehole.’ He had a gift for that kind of repartee.

‘He was all right.’

‘You wee poof!’ he said and pointed at the wall without waiting for an answer. ‘That goes with you, by the way!’

I never had gone in for posters, so the only thing on the wall was a picture I’d torn out of a magazine. Don’t ask me why I’d put it there with a strip of Scotch tape top and bottom. Not because of his long blond hair, that was for sure, or because, Christ, I fancied him. A picture of a knight on horseback. Why not? There were worse things you could stick on a wall.

‘I won’t get paid till Friday. If you want me to leave, I’ll leave then.’

‘Today – I’ve a friend coming.’

‘Who?’ He didn’t have any friends as far as I knew, just people he drank with until sooner or later they got sick of one another. A nasty thought struck me. ‘You talking about a woman?’

‘That’s my business.’ But he couldn’t stop himself from giving a wee smirk.

‘You tell her about Nettie?’

He sneered at me. ‘Nettie, is it? You mean your mammy?’

‘Did you?’

‘What would I do that for? Your fucking head’s wasted.’

‘Is whoever-she-is moving in?’

‘Before she steps in that door, I want you on the other side of it. And that’s it. Out, finished, on your own. No more charity.’

‘I’ve more right here than you have. If my mother was here, she wouldn’t let you get away with it. You only walked in here five minutes ago.’ Wrong on all counts, as a matter of fact. In reverse order: he’d been here for years, and who could ever tell what Nettie would do? Third, and the one that mattered, my bloody mother had signed papers that made him the tenant. Love’s young dream.

‘I’m a fool to myself,’ he said. ‘I’ve been good to you.’

On the other side of the road I put the rucksack down. I’d pocketed the spare key on my way out; God knows why; a souvenir of good times? I took a last look: end of a terrace of pebble-dashers, a cold box with four rooms. Built after the war, lines and miles of them dumped on the edges of the city, no pubs, no pictures, crap wee shops. Metal frames showed in straps along the edges of the wall in every room, like the skeleton on an insect. The competition to get one of them was terrific. Everyone wanted out of the old tenements, so there was a points system. Points for how long you’d been on the waiting list and points for how many children you had. My mother just had me, but the two of us got a house. Rumour had it that she’d slept with a councillor. That’s the kind of rumour somebody always wants to share with you. Since then, the garden had gone to hell in long tangles of sick-looking grass, a colour of its own as if the earth had taken a scunner at us. Under the window of my bedroom upstairs the pebble-dash had flaked off like patches of acne. Funny thing is, that hadn’t happened to any of the other houses. We were always an embarrassment to the neighbours.

Home. That was one way of describing a place I’d never liked, but walking down the road I couldn’t think of another one.

CHAPTER FOUR

By bus the factory was ten minutes away. The plan had been to walk it, but with all the nonsense I didn’t have time. After paying the fare, I had a handful of silver between me and pay day on Friday. Getting off the bus, I wasn’t looking for much, just a proper job where you got up in the morning, went home after a shift, got paid at the end of the week. I didn’t know where I was going to sleep that night. If somebody had told me, see this job you’ve got, you’re going to be working there for the next thirty years, I’d have said bloody wonderful.

The way it turned out, I lasted five days.

That very first morning I saw her sitting in the car, but I was too busy worrying about being late to pay attention. I’d got off the bus on a side road with shitty wasteland behind me and in front a building behind a high link metal fence. I walked along by the fence, looking for a way in, and started to panic when I couldn’t find one. When I got to the corner, the fence stretched away along the side street but I still couldn’t see any sign of a gate. I started down that street, changed my mind and hurried all the way back to where I’d started. Through the link fence, the place seemed empty of life. Even when I went round the far corner and found there was a gate, I couldn’t see anyone. Where were they all? How late was I? Had I got the start time wrong? Why couldn’t I see anyone going into work? It was like one of those nightmares that don’t make any sense, and all the time the clock was ticking. Inside, I half ran into the first opening and found myself in a little courtyard with a car parked by the wall. I didn’t know much about cars, but it was a big one – you didn’t need to be an expert to see that – and it had been polished until it shone. The windows were steamed up.

In the wing mirror, I could see my hair standing on end and the sweat on my face. Don’t ask me what I thought I was doing when I went to the window. Looking for directions? Bending down, I got so close that I could see a girl’s face turned to look at me. Not clearly – she didn’t wipe the glass or roll down the window – and I stared in until it occurred to me I might be frightening her.

Straightening up, I saw a door in the wall with the firm’s name on a sign so discreet it was no wonder I hadn’t noticed it.

As I went in, a racket like machine-gun fire stopped abruptly. Behind a long counter, a woman was sitting with her back to me. Alerted by something, maybe a colder movement of the air, she whipped her head round from the typewriter and stared at me. ‘Staff don’t come in this door,’ she said. I hadn’t even opened my mouth. It was as if she knew at first glance I was a mistake; but then I suppose that’s what she was paid for.

Turning, I saw a door at the back marked STAFF ONLY.

‘Not that way. Go back outside,’ she said, ‘through the swing doors. You’re not supposed to go in from here.’

‘Sounds like a joke.’ She looked down her nose at me, and I made the mistake of trying to explain. It was a joke my father had been fond of, an old joke. ‘You know, “If you want to go to Dublin you shouldn’t start from here.” ’

A man in shirtsleeves came round a partition at the back and stared at me.

Like the Kerry man trying to get to Dublin, it wasn’t a good start.

CHAPTER FIVE

The second morning, seeing the same car in the same place and steam on the windows was a surprise. Determined not to be late, I was early, so I’d gone round that way to kill time, never imagining she’d be there again. Not that I could be sure she was, since I didn’t dare go into the yard for a closer look. But, if not her, someone was in the car or why else would the windows be steamed up?

‘She’s there all day,’ one of the women on the line said.

‘The girl,’ the other one said and laughed.

I’d asked, first chance I got, ‘Who’s the girl in the car?’

‘What car would that be?’

‘Dozens of cars out there.’

Comedians.

‘I’m talking about the wee park round the side. Not the big one at the front.’

‘What about it?’

‘There’s a girl sits in a car there in the morning.’

‘All day,’ she said then. ‘The girl,’ the other one said. You could tell they thought they were funny. They laughed at their own jokes. They stood on either side of a press, and my job for that part of the day was to take away the full bin of castings and slot in an empty one. Hearing them wasn’t easy. The big space echoed with the fart and whine of machines that dribbled oil to make rainbows on the pools of scummy water under where the corrugated-iron roof leaked.

‘All day, every day.’

‘Until he leaves.’

‘Who?’ I wanted to know.

They ignored me, talking to each other.

‘He’s away before us.’

‘Put it that way.’

‘That’ll be why you might think she was just there in the morning.’

‘Instead of the whole bloody day.’

‘Morning till night.’

‘Right enough, you can’t see, not from here.’

‘But he can. Out of his window, he can see. He can see, all right.’

All through this, they never stopped working. Their hands made the same movements over and over again. Hands and tongues, they never stopped.

‘Catch me putting up with it.’

‘Catch you getting the chance.’

‘Maybe it’s worth it.’

‘More ways than one, maybe.’ She had a dirty laugh.

‘Not for money, not for the other, not in a million years. It gives me the creeps.’

‘He likes to keep an eye on her.’

The one who said that laughed again, but this time her face didn’t laugh.

Something about the joke wasn’t funny. All day I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

What kind of man made a girl sit outside all day? And the question that really bothered me: a girl who would do that, what kind of girl would she be? I was so distracted, I went the wrong way when the foreman switched jobs on me, and pushed the bin through two sets of doors without giving it a thought. It was the brightness that stopped me in my tracks. The sound of the machinery in here was different, and everything was clean and new-looking. I hardly had time to take in the size of the place, when I was punched on the shoulder.

‘What are you playing at?’

I followed the foreman along the corridor between the doors.

Without looking round, he said, ‘Keep out of there.’

‘Is that a different firm?’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ he said.

‘What are they making?’

‘A special truncheon that works as a whip one way and club the other – that one’s export only.’ He grinned. ‘It’s used on Death Row in the States.’

‘What?’

‘Forget it, I’m joking,’ and marching off he let the doors swing back on me as I followed.

The women weren’t much more helpful.

‘They make all kinds of different stuff,’ one of them assured me.

‘And the money’s good. See, if you get through there? You’re on a different rate.’

‘I don’t like it,’ I said.

‘Don’t bother your head about it, son. A job’s a job. You need a job, there’s plenty worse than this one. Anyways, most of it goes abroad. It’s no for here.’

‘Who cares where it’s for?’ the other one said, frowning. It was the first time I’d seen parts slipping past her on the belt, like a stutter, her quick hands missing a beat.

That night I dreamed I was riding across a bridge, in armour. In the water I saw myself mirrored, metal gloves on my hands, a plume of feathers on my helmet. I was going to rescue the girl in the castle and if I had to kill to do it, that was all right. I had a sword.

My first thought on Wednesday morning was for the girl. I was as tired as if I hadn’t slept, but I went the long way round the building to check if her car was there.