My Life as a Man Read online

  I shook my head. Crazy. They might be good at handing out a hiding, but for sure they were no judges of character.

  ‘I haven’t done anything to get somebody after me,’ I lied.

  He shut his good eye and I thought he’d drifted off to sleep. But it opened abruptly and he whistled, ‘They think you have.’

  ‘Did they say who they were?’

  ‘Oh, aye. Stuck a visiting card up my arse. You want to have a look for it?’

  ‘Maybe the police’ll find them.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’ He wasn’t a great believer in the police.

  ‘I’m sorry about this. But it’s nothing to do with me.’

  I started to get up. He said something, but his speech was getting worse. I leaned close again.

  ‘Did you steal a car? They want it back awful bad.’

  I was at the door, when he made another noise. I hesitated, having had enough, then went back one more time. I felt I owed him that, though it would have been hard to say what for. He whispered, ‘The wee guy was a madman. You should get the fuck away from here.’

  Going back along the corridor, I wondered if it was possible to beat family feeling into somebody. That wasn’t a nice thought; on the other hand, I’d never heard him be that human before – not, at least, since the early days when he was putting on the style to court my mother.

  I went along past signs for X-ray and Physiotherapy and, under one for something called Oncology, realised I was being followed. Or thought I was. Or rather was sure and then not sure. A big slouching man in a crumpled blue suit and a shirt without a tie; he was so close the first time I looked round (without warning, because it had come into my mind I should check and with the thought it was done – ‘a word and a blow’, as the Irish guy said about his mother) I could see a sore inside his nostril where a hair had been pulled out. I convulsed into a walk and next time I looked back he was further off and that for some reason seemed even more suspicious. I wasn’t going anywhere in particular now, but it did seem he was keeping in touch; near enough so that I didn’t see me managing some clever way of shaking him off, even if I could have thought of one. Instead I stuck to the master plan. I went on walking.

  After all, hospitals are big places; you could walk for days, allowing for exhaustion and the need to eat. Toilets, they’ve got those, and come to think of it counters where you could buy a pie or a scone and a cup of tea. Maybe after a couple of days when you passed the same nurse for the tenth time she might send for the police. Of course, it would be easier to spot weird stuff at night; if I kept walking until night, spot a stranger then, ‘I see strangers!’ and they’d have you. Have him. He was still there. I could hardly see for sweat. Fear-sweat cold on my back and the insides of my legs; you could keep your mind busy chattering in your head, but you couldn’t fool your body.

  By this time, I was moving so randomly I was on automatic pilot, and it crash-landed me halfway up a quiet stair. He came up after me, taking the steps three at a time. His fingers caught at my sleeve, and I leaped away from him by half a yard. That wouldn’t work with the full grip on my arm that was coming next. Just then a door opened and a group of four in white coats came down from the landing above. I stopped and turned all in the one movement, the ballet of the terrified idiot, and at once I was in the middle of the group and going past him. They didn’t squeeze to the side; it was their hospital after all.

  ‘I wanted to ask you again about my mother,’ I said to the one on my left.

  His name was MacRae, we established on the way down, and if he was a doctor at all it was very lately. From something he said, though, I worked out what oncology meant and told him my mother had made a miraculous recovery, being superstitious for her sake. He thought I was a lunatic, or maybe that was the way everybody looked to him after a night without sleep. He couldn’t work out how to get rid of me, and the other three were too tired to care or thought it was funny. I almost turned into the canteen with them, but I’d a feeling I’d worn out my welcome.

  The short stretch between the canteen and the reception area was busy, and a public phone gave me an excuse to stay there. I bent my head to the dialling tone and spun numbers randomly. I listened to the squeal for unobtainable and looked wistfully at the exit. In the car park out there Mrs Morton was waiting for me. She’d taken it for granted I’d want to see how Alec was; and so it was her fault I was here at all.

  The man in the blue suit interrupted my line of sight. He picked up the phone one along from me and put his tongue out at the side of his mouth to help him concentrate as he dialled. Being angry with Mrs Morton didn’t mean I didn’t want to protect her. Before he could open his mouth, I put my phone down and hurried off. He had no choice but to follow, hopefully before he could call for reinforcements.

  I went into Reception and sat on one of the benches. He came and sat behind me. When I turned, he scowled at me. I had a feeling I’d turned a chore for him into something personal. He’d decided not to like me. Irritating him hadn’t been a good idea.

  After an hour or so, I began to feel exposed. The numbers on the benches were thinning out. Minute by minute, people were called and got up and went off. There were three receptionists, then two, then one of them disappeared into the back office behind the desk. I felt a hot breath on my neck and a voice like sandpaper on rust muttered, ‘On your feet. If you fucking make me, I’ll carry you out.’

  I looked both ways. At the end of the bench, a woman sat with a little girl on her lap. Opposite, an old man was blowing his nose into his hankie and taking an interest in the result.

  I turned and asked politely, ‘What?’

  ‘I need a shit,’ he said, as if appealing to my better nature.

  That’s what his breath had reminded me of; another puzzle solved.

  ‘If you’re hungry, you’d be better with a sandwich.’

  While he was thinking about that, I got up and went to the reception desk. The nurse didn’t look up.

  ‘Here, you,’ I said.

  She was putting a card into a box with a long row of them. I reached over and took it from her. When I turned it upside-down the cards poured out across the desk.

  She must have had a button under there. Help came quickly.

  Very impressive, but, of course, the Evening Times had run an article on how much security had been improved after the latest assault on a nurse.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Security told me calling the police would be the usual routine. I told them I was getting over a nervous breakdown.

  ‘At your age,’ the older one said with a frown. Mental trouble in his book was obviously something they’d have called malingering when he was defending his country from the Hun; or maybe just lack of moral fibre, as my old headmaster would have put it.

  The younger one was more sympathetic. ‘You stopped your medication?’ he asked. He had ginger hair and pop eyes and, ungratefully, I wondered if he was talking from personal experience.

  At the end of the day, I hadn’t stolen anything or hit anybody. Spilling record cards over a desk went more with having a screw loose than being a master criminal. And it was probably coming up to their tea break. They told me to push off. ‘It’s a kick up the arse you need,’ the older one explained.

  Left to myself, I’d have found an obscure side exit. Like all old city hospitals this place was built like a rabbit warren, and unless an army was looking for me they couldn’t be watching all of them. Mutt and Jeff, however, insisted on seeing me out the front door.

  Fortunately, there was no sign of the big man in the blue suit. Maybe he’d given up, or maybe he was wandering around the building looking for side exits. Maybe he couldn’t wait any longer for his shit. To my shame I didn’t check the car park. Mrs Morton, I told myself, must be long gone.

  I walked for a long time, and came out of my daze near a bus stop with a familiar number on display. Not long afterwards, the right bus came along and I did what I’d done for most of my life
. I got on and went, for want of a better word, home.

  Going back there wasn’t a bad plan. I thought about it as I watched the tenements turn into the familiar scabby houses of the scheme. Hairy Alec was in hospital. His girl might be grateful for word of how he was doing. Assuming she’d got over her opinion of me as a four-letter type, there might be a bed in it for the night. For sure, I didn’t have anywhere else to go. Well, that wasn’t quite true. I could have gone to a hotel; Mrs Morton had given me money. True, I’d stuck it in my pocket without looking, as if I could fool both of us into thinking I wasn’t taking it. But it was notes, all right, a little bundle of them. Enough, surely, for a night’s bed and breakfast. The truth was I’d no idea how much that would be. Thing was, I’d never been in a hotel. A boarding house would be cheaper, but I’d never been in one of those either. The heavies had checked out Hairy Alec’s once. Wasn’t there a saying about lightning never striking twice in the same place? I went home.

  ‘What a fool you are,’ Mrs Morton said.

  That was later, of course. I had got off the bus and walked up past the waste ground and there at the top of the hill were a couple of kids standing looking at a car, a big shiny car which had no business being in the scheme. One of them had a stone in his hand and I could see he was planning to scratch a little revenge on an unfair world, so I suggested they fuck off.

  The girl had given Mrs Morton a cup of tea. She sat there sipping it and the girl said to her, ‘You were right,’ and to me, ‘I didn’t think you’d be back.’

  I made a modest salt-of-the-earth gesture to indicate how easy it was to misjudge people. All the time I was telling her how Alec was I could feel Mrs Morton’s eyes on me. The funny thing was, I sensed that she knew how much I was leaving out.

  We got down to that once we were in the car. I could see she wasn’t happy, and I hadn’t even mentioned the ragged scratch I’d seen on the passenger side as I was getting in.

  ‘You were telling that girl the truth? Your stepfather’s going to be all right?’

  ‘Alec?’ I didn’t think of him as a step- or any other nearly sort of a father.

  ‘Is he going to be all right?’

  ‘He’s not going to die. I thought you were going to wait for me at the hospital.’

  ‘There didn’t seem any point.’ She cleared her throat. ‘I thought if I talked to Bernard that might help.’

  She’d driven home from the hospital. As she turned in to the road where she lived, two men came out of her gate. ‘Just the look of them,’ she said. ‘They weren’t men who’d any business being at our house.’ She’d driven past without stopping.

  ‘Was one of them a big man in a blue suit?’

  When she said no, a big man in a brown suit, I told her about my encounter at the hospital.

  ‘Bernard’s gone mad,’ she said. ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘We could go to the police.’

  As soon as I said it, it seemed like a pretty good suggestion. Let somebody else deal with this. It was way beyond me.

  ‘Why should they believe us? Bernard wasn’t there – he didn’t do anything himself. And on the way to the hospital you said yourself your stepfather is the kind of man who gets into all kinds of trouble. Borrowing money,’ she added, which made me laugh.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ she asked.

  ‘You make it sound as if that’s the worst trouble you can think of.’

  I say ‘laugh’, but I wasn’t all that amused. It was only more hot air blasting out in contempt for her big house, her comfort, even the money she’d given me as a handout. Being frightened doesn’t make people nicer to one another.

  ‘What a fool you are,’ she said.

  After that we didn’t speak, and I looked out of the window for a while until I realised we’d passed the Kelvin Hall twice.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  ‘Third time,’ I said, breaking my silence.

  ‘What?’ she said, breaking hers, for which I was grateful. I’d thought she wasn’t going to answer me. I hadn’t anticipated the pleasure I felt when she did.

  ‘We’ve gone past the Kelvin Hall three times.’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘We’re going round in circles.’

  ‘I wonder what it would be like to do that for ever,’ she said, so quietly she might have been talking to herself.

  It sounded like hell to me.

  ‘Not enough petrol,’ I said.

  ‘At the house, I sat trying to work out what I could say to Bernard that might make things right for you, so that you could get on with your life. And then you turned up with Norman.’

  ‘Did you think of something?’

  That might have come out tough. It didn’t. I waited for her to find some magic wand of words that would wave it all away. Hope squeezed my stomach like a fist.

  ‘After what happened to your stepfather,’ she said, ‘I realise how stupid that was.’

  At a car park sign in a side street, she turned the wheel and went in. It was half empty, though it belonged to a large hotel that fronted the crowded pavements of Sauchiehall Street. I thought there would have been more cars, but she told me the hotel had gone downmarket and wasn’t too fussy about the kind of guests it admitted.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Short-stay guests. Oh, couples for an afternoon.’

  I supposed that was something she might have heard her husband discuss.

  ‘If they’re looking for us,’ she said, ‘it’s better that the car’s out of sight.’

  ‘Is it all right to leave it here?’ I wondered. ‘Isn’t this for guests?’

  She chewed her lip. ‘We could get a room. We need somewhere to think what to do.’

  Whatever kind of hotel it was, I didn’t think we could walk in and ask for a room without luggage – I’d seen enough movies to know that. She told me to open the boot and sure enough there were a couple of cases, a big one and a smaller. All I could think was that she must have packed them at her house, but I couldn’t find words to ask her about it. I carried them in and stood back waiting while she went to the reception counter. All the time she spoke to him, the clerk tilted his head and looked past her at me from under his brows.

  ‘He didn’t think much of me,’ I told her.

  ‘Some of them think the sneer comes with the job,’ she said. ‘I should have asked for a suite.’

  ‘What’s a suite?’

  She sighed as if I’d annoyed her, and said she was surprised they’d let me in the door even of this place dressed the way I was. As I was about to follow the guy who’d appeared from somewhere to carry the cases, she told me to wait for her. The two of them went into the lift and I watched the number above it change from 1 to 4. Avoiding the receptionist’s eye, I wandered up and down until I couldn’t stand it any longer and perched on a chair with my back to the desk.

  Not long into an endless waiting time I convinced myself she wasn’t going to come back; but she did and we went shopping. I protested all the way, asking why it should suddenly be all right to be out in the open among the crowds where anyone might see us, but she paid no attention. She led and I followed into Treron’s and C&A and Saxone’s.

  ‘I thought you didn’t have any money at all.’

  ‘There was some in the house.’

  ‘How much?’ Alarmed, my first thought was that she shouldn’t have taken anything. A strange thought, since it was her house, after all.

  ‘Not a lot,’ she said. ‘A handful of notes on Bernard’s dressing table. He might not even miss them.’

  I got a pair of shoes that slipped on as if they had been made for me, and because when I took off my sandshoes there were holes in my socks she bought a pack of them as well. I got two Egyptian cotton shirts, put one on and carried the other in a bag, and trousers and a brown belt and two pullovers and a lightweight jacket with a hood to keep the rain off. And the funny thing was I felt as if everyone in the shoe shop was staring at us, but as I
got clothes and put them on it got easier so that when we walked back into the hotel it felt natural to be walking beside her.

  She led the way across the lobby past fat chairs, empty except for a couple having coffee, and pressed the button for a lift. When it came, we got in and before the doors could close a man stepped in to join us. He was a squat man, just up to my shoulder but he’d a thick neck and shoulders like a weightlifter. I was in such a state of nerves that I never took my eyes off that neck of his until he got out on the third floor. On the fourth, Mrs Morton, after a glance at the notice with room numbers and arrows pointing the way, set off to the left.

  ‘Am I on this floor, too?’ I asked when I caught up with her.

  She put her key into a door. ‘Come in,’ she said.

  Inside, I stood looking around. She closed the door behind me. It was a big room with a couch and chairs, and a dressing table with mirrors, and a bed.

  ‘You’re the one who wanted to save money,’ she said. ‘If we just want a place to take our breath, why pay for two rooms?’

  ‘You shouldn’t have bought me anything.’ I pointed to the bags on the floor, among them the one stuffed with my old clothes. ‘There wasn’t any need.’

  ‘Dressed the way you were, you’d have attracted attention in a place like this.’ As if to placate me, she said, ‘If I’d remembered the chequebook, I’d have used it.’ When I didn’t answer, she spoiled it. ‘You do know what a chequebook is?’

  I was upset, and it didn’t help when the look on her face showed that she hadn’t intended to insult me. She’d managed to do it without trying. It was true I didn’t know anybody who used a chequebook. But I read, didn’t I? I listened to the wireless. What kind of idiot did she think I was?

  And then I thought of the room she’d been in at my house, a comfortless house in the middle of a giant scheme of identical houses, steel frames and pebble walls the colour of fresh excrement, slapped up by the planners on an empty moor that would have been better left to birds and bog water and the icy wind. What had she seen there to make her think I was anything more than an ignorant boy? Not books. Hairy Alec didn’t go in for books, and he’d have got rid of any of mine the moment my foot was over the door. No, she’d seen shabby furniture and unwashed dishes, oh, and Hairy Alec’s tart, unwashed as the dishes and half moronic.