My Life as a Man (11 page)

I couldn’t work out the light. Though grey drops of our breath covered the windows like a curtain, still it was too bright.

‘What time is it?’

‘Just after seven. In the morning.’

‘We slept all night in the car on the street?’

I wiped the windscreen with the edge of my hand. A line of railing appeared in the arc of cleared glass, and beyond it grass and trees.

‘Quiet enough here,’ she said.

‘Nowhere’s that quiet.’ I was a city boy. ‘We’re lucky we weren’t robbed or killed.’

She got out and stood beside the open door, stretching and easing her head one way and the other. I shivered in a surge of cold morning air. ‘What are you doing?’

‘My neck’s stiff.’

I got out reluctantly.

She was looking around in a kind of amazement. ‘Aberdeen,’ she said. Turning from me, she stared across to where opposite the park big semi-detached houses, looming solid and grey,
were beginning to show the day’s first lights. ‘What in God’s name am I doing in Aberdeen?’

She shook her head and walked away. I followed until she came to a stop by the gates into the park. Mist was being tugged like scarves off the tops of the trees. ‘And your mother lives
here,’ she said. Under my fingers, the iron rods of the left-hand gate felt cold. There was no way I could tell if I was outside or inside the cage they made. ‘Do you know how to get
there?’

I asked one pedestrian and then another, and neither of them admitted ignorance and both sent us the wrong way. At last in a corner shop I got the right directions and found a street of
weathered
FOR SALE
boards, windows with dirty, drooping curtains; and halfway along a sign which meant, if I had the correct number, my mother was living in a boarding
house.

Only, as it turned out, she wasn’t.

‘Single room, bed and breakfast.’ The woman opened the book that lay on the hall table and pointed to my mother’s name as evidence for the prosecution. ‘She left owing a
week’s rent.’

‘When was this?’ I asked.

‘Would you be willing to settle the week? If she’s your mother, like you say.’

‘She was by herself?’ On her own in a single room; whoever he had been, the new lover hadn’t lasted long.

‘Nine weeks she was here. The last one unpaid for. Made an excuse on the Saturday, and didn’t come down for breakfast on the Sunday. When I went up, she was gone. Case and
all.’

I went out and told Mrs Morton. As far as I was concerned that was it, but she went in by herself and five minutes later came out with an address.

‘If she knows where my mother is, why hasn’t she been chasing her for the rent?’ I jerked my head at the house. ‘Maybe she’s lying about being owed
money.’

‘Who knows?’ Mrs Morton said. ‘Anyway, she settled for half.’

‘You paid her?’ I was indignant. ‘What d’you do that for?’ I decided rich people had no idea of the value of money.

‘In exchange for your mother’s new address.’

‘How did you know she had it?’

‘Town like this, it’s a small world.’

She didn’t know my mother. A woman like my mother might have left for London or Timbuktu. All the same, it had to have been worth asking. Stood to reason, I should have asked. I decided
perhaps Mrs Morton wanted to find my mother more than I did, and spent the journey frowning over why that might be. Did she imagine my mother would take me off her hands?

I’d assumed she’d let me go in on my own. When I suggested it, though, she said, ‘I’m cold, I’m hungry, and I need to use the lavatory.’

Walking up the flights of steps to the front door, I asked, ‘Are you sure this is it?’

‘You saw the name of the village. And this is the first house outside it. That’s what I was told.’

I could hear she wasn’t a hundred per cent certain. After the boarding house, neither of us had anticipated anything like this. When I pressed the bell, I heard it ringing but no sound of
movement in the house.

When I thought about my mother, I remembered her in the morning, coughing, in her old purple dressing gown. Or sitting with her feet under her on the couch, picking a shred of ham from between
her front teeth – she liked ham sandwiches, and I’d grill the bacon while she was cutting bread. Or making me laugh about something some fool of a man had said to her the night before.
Even when I disapproved, if she set her mind to it she could make me laugh. When I gave in and did, she would join in and finish with a wide smile showing a strip of gum above big white teeth. That
was how I’d always liked best to remember her.

When she suddenly appeared in the doorway, taking me by surprise, like that, even I could see she might be a woman men would want.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.

It wasn’t an easy thing to explain. Inside, while I tried, she kept looking from me to the door through which Mrs Morton had gone to use the lavatory. Neither of us had sat down. We
hadn’t kissed or even touched.

‘How did you find me?’

‘Your landlady.’

‘That old cow. Did you give her money?’ My face gave me away. ‘More fool you.’

When Mrs Morton came back, she said, ‘What a lovely house.’

The thing is, she wasn’t just making noises for the sake of something to say. From the street, we’d looked up to the house past two steep terraces filled with low bushes and heather.
Here in the front room, with not a dressing gown or half-chewed sandwich in sight, a carpet in dark swirls of red and blue ran from the doorway to the bay windows. You could have put our living
room in the scheme on that carpet and had enough space left over to tuck in our old kitchen as well. The furniture was big, solid, dark; the chairs and the long couch in blue leather. On one wall
there was a painting of hills behind brown fields with a wee skelf of a pale moon above it all. On another, one of a harbour with old-time sailing ships. Both of them had an artist’s name in
the corner, made with strokes of a brush.

It
was
a fine house, and that amazed me.

‘It belonged to Bobbie’s parents,’ my mother explained to – Mrs Morton, not to me. ‘Bobbie keeps asking me if I’d like to change it. For something more
modern, you know.’ She looked round and made a little gesture like patting the air with her hand. ‘But I tell him I know fine he loves it, and I don’t mind one way or the
other.’

Who the fuck was Bobbie?

After she left us, the Hairy Man and I lived in shit. Even when she was there, it hadn’t been a whole lot better. If you don’t have money, it takes an effort not to live that way. I
can’t describe how strange it was now to hear her doing the homes and gardens bit. Our gracious hostess.

Mrs Morton had that effect on her, and that must have been most of the problem. It hadn’t occurred to me till that moment how odd it would seem to her, the two of us being together.
I’d wasted all those hours driving through the night when I might have thought up something plausible.

When I explained that I was helping out because Mr Morton was my boss, my mother wasn’t in a believing mood. ‘You work for Mrs Morton’s husband?’ She thought about it.
‘Where would that be? What does he do?’

‘He has a factory.’

‘You can’t drive?’ she asked Mrs Morton, who raised her eyebrows and said nothing.

‘What’s that got to do with it?’ By that, if I meant anything, it must have been something like the rich don’t have to drive themselves, even if they can.

My mother looked at me, then at Mrs Morton and then she got up and went to the window.

‘Come here,’ she said.

I joined her in studying the view. There was a nice display of roses in the neighbour’s garden over the way. There wasn’t anybody walking on the pavements. The only car in sight was
the one we’d parked on the other side of the road opposite her gate. It was a quiet street.

‘That car?’ she wondered. ‘He trusts
you
with that car?’

From that exact instant, what she wanted was us out of there. I wish I’d gone; it would have let us think better of each other. I got stubborn, though. If I’d been asked then,
I’d have said because she was my mother and I felt she should help me. Now I’d put it down to having no idea what else to do.

As for Mrs Morton, I knew she must be tired, have a stiff neck, all the rest that must be wrong. But – you can’t always tell from the way someone looks how they feel on the inside
– she appeared relaxed sitting there. She looked good, as a matter of fact, and that, of course, didn’t help.

My mother said, ‘I have to go out now. I have an appointment.’

Mrs Morton stood up, too. They both waited. I didn’t get up.

‘Who with?’ I asked.

‘With Bobbie.’ When she glanced at her watch, it shone gold. ‘I’m already late.’

She went out and came back with her coat on. While she was gone, Mrs Morton didn’t say anything and I kept my eyes stubbornly on the floor.

My mother held out an envelope. ‘This came from your father. He’s put his address on it. Here, take it. It’s no use to me.’

It had ‘Happy Birthday’ on the front. I folded it and stuck it in my pocket. ‘What does Bobbie do?’ I asked.

She frowned, but couldn’t resist saying, for Mrs Morton’s benefit, ‘He’s a lawyer. A partner in the firm. His grandfather started it.’

‘I’d like to meet him,’ I said.

I got uncomfortable the minute she started to bite her lip; it was what she always did when she had a problem to work out. She stared down at me, chewing her lip, and then she turned and left
without another word. It was only later, when the police arrived, that I understood how much she didn’t want us there when Bobbie came home. I must have made her a little desperate.

‘Are you hungry?’ I asked Mrs Morton.

‘You can’t just make yourself at home,’ she said.

She followed me along the corridor until I found the kitchen. There was a table you could sit a family round and a mile of surfaces and pots hung in a row on the wall. She watched while I got
bread and sliced it and found cheese in the larder. ‘Don’t worry,’ I told her. ‘And put the kettle on.’ I didn’t see why I should do everything by myself.

You could say I was showing off.

She didn’t object any more, but sat down opposite me and ate the sandwiches I made, some on cheese and one on a slice of cold meat I’d found between two plates. My mother
hadn’t turned into some kind of perfect housekeeper, which was a relief. Maybe they ate out a lot. Chewing, I looked out at the garden. It was big enough to have trees in it, and grass cut so
short you could have stroked it with the back of your hand. I tried to picture my mother kneeling among the neat flowerbeds, but my imagination failed me.

‘Why did you say you wanted to meet him, this Bobbie?’ she asked.

‘What?’ I gulped my tea; she made weak tea. Though I was hungry, the sandwiches were dry in my mouth.

‘Were you thinking maybe Bobbie didn’t even know she had a son? That maybe your mother had forgotten to mention it to him? Was that the idea?’

‘What idea?’

‘A kind of blackmail. That she wouldn’t want him to know how old she is?’

‘Old enough to have a son like me?’ The word ‘blackmail’ made me angry. ‘I can see she wouldn’t like that.
You
wouldn’t like that,’ I told
her.

No sooner were the words out of my mouth than Alice came into my mind, the child Mrs Morton had lost.

She wet the tip of her middle finger and began to dab up crumbs from her plate. The sun shining in put a halo of light round her hair.

Without looking up, she said, ‘It doesn’t happen all at once. You have to stop respecting yourself. It gets taken away from you in bits.’

I knew she was telling me about sitting outside the factory in Morton’s car. She didn’t have to explain to me she was talking about that, I just knew. From the first, it had seemed
so strange to me. Day after day; being so submissive to Morton. I still thought that was the most important thing about her.

Before I could think of anything to say, the bell rang and I was glad of the excuse to get up and answer it. I assumed it was my mother, come back because she’d decided it wasn’t
safe to leave me with her new belongings. There was a man on the step standing so close he was almost touching me when I opened the door. My first thought was it must be Bobbie, home early from
doing whatever lawyers do; my second that Bobbie wouldn’t have to ring the bell. Then I saw the man standing behind him on the path. The man on the step was small so that I looked over his
head and the man on the path was so tall I had to look up at him. I knew him at once. A big, slouching man in a crumpled blue suit, he had pursued me through the Infirmary in Glasgow.

Before I could slam the door shut, the man on the step put his hand on my chest and pushed me back inside.

There had been three men in the group Mr Bernard had shown round his factory the afternoon my fledgling career came to a full stop. One was a narrow man with gold-rimmed glasses, the second a
red-faced farmer type, and the third this little swaggering man with the build of a wrestler. His gaze went from Mrs Morton to me and then to the plates and the breadboard with the sliced loaf. He
took his time and we waited and when he finished he looked back at me. He had small brown eyes, not soft, but hard like little polished stones, and when he spoke the words grumbled at the back of
his mouth like pebbles rattling in a bag.

‘Where’s your mammy?’

‘Gone out.’ That came in a squeak. I cleared my throat and tried for something firmer. ‘She’ll be back in a minute.’

The threat didn’t bother him. He turned from me. ‘And you’ll be Mrs Morton. I never had the pleasure. I know your husband well.’ He scowled. ‘You could say too
fucking well.’