I drove Mac back to the Wall.
‘It really as bad as you say in there?’ I asked.
‘Pretty much.’ It was a bad scene. I wondered what Hod had been up to with my old pub. ‘You should come 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 darkness, the water freezing as Debs stormed in and pulled on the light.
‘What the fuck is this?’ she yelled.
She held something in her hand, but my eyes wouldn’t adjust to the sudden brightness. ‘What, what is it?’
She slapped the item into the bathwater; the little wraps of speed fell out of the baggie. I tried desperately to pick them up.
‘Gus, how could you?’ She started to sob. ‘I trusted you.’
She couldn’t look at me, turned and fled.
The wraps were a bust. No way back for them. Let the lot go down the plughole with the bathwater. When I dressed, Debs was sitting in the living room, there’s a phrase, stony-faced.
In the time I’d known her, I’d seen every expression there is to see on Debs’s face. I’d say there were some I would never want to see again, and prayed I never would, but this one was perhaps the expression I knew least how to deal with.
Said, ‘Sorry.’
Her look went up a notch in intensity, almost a wince — an ‘Are we here again so soon?’ God, it wounded me.
Added, ‘I am, truly.’
She stood up, raised her hands, dropped them again. ‘Gus, I can’t take this any more.’
This shithole flat of ours was too small to hold the tension. You couldn’t have a barney when there was nowhere to run off to, slam doors behind you. I went for the mainline: ‘Well, what do you want me to say or do? Tell me, I’ll do it.’
She walked to the kitchenette, filled a glass with water from the tap. The dog watched her as she moved. I did too. A bellicose look burned in her eyes, kind that kept the whites permanently on display. I admired her ability to keep her anger in check; I never could. She slammed down the glass. It wobbled on the counter, some water spilled over the brim. ‘I don’t know what you can say or do, Gus… you’ve said and done it all before. But bringing wraps of charlie into our home.’
‘It was speed.’ I knew I should have kept my mouth shut.
‘I don’t care what it is — it’s drugs!’
Fuck. Hoped she wasn’t gonna go Nancy Reagan on me, start the just say no spiel. I sighed, knew I was onto a loser. I dropped myself in the chair. Truth told, I didn’t have the heart, or the passion, for another row. I wanted to make her see I was contrite, but I wanted her to know I was hurting inside for reasons I could do nothing about. I wondered if she’d forgotten about Michael for a second, but I knew Debs better than that: this was all about my brother. She was wondering where it was leading me, and us, to.
Debs raised the glass again, sipped. I watched her put her hand through her hair. ‘Look, Gus. I’m sorry too.’
I turned to face her. ‘You are?’
She came round the edge of the counter, crouched before me. ‘I know you’re hurting.’ She took my hands in hers. I didn’t want her, or anybody’s, sympathy. My pain was my problem. I removed my gaze. She said, ‘I just don’t want you going back on the drink. You said you’d stay clean.’
‘I am clean… more or less.’ I pushed my luck: ‘I think you’re making a bit of a fuss over nothing.’
She sparked at that. ‘Well, I don’t!’
I got up, went to the other side of the room. We’d drawn our battle lines; I didn’t like where this conversation was going. When she shouted and threw things, I could handle it. When she locked me out, no trouble. But the close control freaked me out. My father had tried to control me with beatings and harsh words and it never worked. I didn’t do control.
I picked up my tabs.
‘Where are you going?’
‘For a smoke.’
Outside on the stair I fired up, got about a third of the way down the smoke when a gadgie with a mop and bucket showed. He wore a black and red Adidas coat like the footy managers have. ‘All right, mate.’
I gave a non-committal nod.
He had a beanie on and it stretched the corners of his eyes. I saw some tats on the back of his neck when he lowered the bucket. ‘There’s, eh, cash due for the stair cleaning.’
I drew on my smoke. ‘What’s this?’
‘Been a stair meeting and that… Three pounds, chief.’
‘Three pounds… this weather. I don’t think so.’
He started to get twitchy, kept rubbing the tip of his nose. ‘It’s three pounds.’
I knocked the tip off my tab, crushed the embers under my boot-heel. ‘You’re getting bugger all out me.’
He looked scoobied, not sure what had happened.
Inside the flat I watched him through the spyhole as he tapped up the auld wifey at number three. She handed over the cash without complaint. I shook my head.
Debs had prepared for my return. She put her hands in the back pockets of her jeans. She’d been at the lip gloss in my absence, said, ‘Look, Gus, I know you’re not equipped to cope with, y’know, the news about Michael.’
There was a whole other row waiting to go up once she heard of my moves to root out his killer. Swearing off the drink was only one of her ultimatums that I’d signed up to. Not looking for trouble was another; and of the two I’d say the latter was the one she placed most store by. If I wanted to keep hold of Debs this time, I had to play by her rules. Only, since Michael’s death, I just didn’t know how that was going to be possible.
‘He was my brother, Debs.’
‘I know.’
‘I can’t just forget he existed.’
‘I’m not asking you to.’
My neck tensed. ‘What are you asking for?’
Debs took her hands out of her pockets, came towards me. ‘I know it can’t be easy, and I know you’ve done really well up until now, but I’m frightened.’
I knew what she was frightened of. She thought I was slipping back to my old ways. She didn’t want to be around me when I was arrested, beaten up, or worse. I didn’t want to confirm her fears, said, ‘Oh, yeah.’
‘Gus, you need help to get over this.’
I saw where this was going, felt my breathing stall. ‘Uh-huh…’
She had a card in her hand. She held it out.
‘A psychiatrist…’
Debs nodded.
‘You want me to see a psychiatrist?’
She handed me the card.
‘I don’t know, Debs.’
Her brows shot up. I saw I wasn’t getting a choice. She put her hands back in her pockets and left me holding the card.