My Life as a Man (6 page)

As I was tucking myself away, I heard voices. My elation evaporated. With the instincts of an intruder, I headed back to the opening, stepping very lightly so that my footsteps wouldn’t
echo on the stone. I went in the same fashion down the stairs, hurrying into the open as if escaping from a trap.

It was a relief to see the empty slope of field and the scatter of grazing cows. Telling myself I’d mistaken crows or sheep or whatever for voices, I walked along by the wall to make sure.
And there they were. Two of them, father and son by the look of them, with their heads thrown back gazing up at the top of the tower. My first thought was that they couldn’t have seen me up
there. This close, all you saw was cloud pouring like water across the lip of the parapet. The old man turned his head, just his head, still thrown back, to look at me. Hairs sprouted from his nose
and his mouth hung open so that I could see there were as many gaps as blackened teeth. He gave a little grunt and the son’s head swung to me every bit as slowly. Their look was considering,
the look of people who had a right to be there this early in the morning. Both sets of eyes were brown, cow-eye colour, the colour of the beasts they owned.

The resemblance, though, ended there. Unlike farmer and son, cows didn’t carry thick sticks. Their mild brown eyes hadn’t between one instant and the next flushed red.

I ran down the field with my breath roaring in my ears. Two of the cattle got in my way, and dashing between them my feet almost slid from under me. All the way, I heard the old man yelling as
if he was demented, ‘Hit him! Catch him and hit him!’

By the time I got to the gate, there was nothing to do but smack both hands on the top bar and jump. Hard enough to take my head off, a stick clanged on the gate as I landed.

I scrambled in through the open door of the car and fell back in the passenger seat as Mrs Morton put her foot down and the car shot out into the road.

It took time to get my breath back. My cheeks were wet, as if I might have wept.

At last I said, ‘You can drive. I didn’t know if you could.’

She wrinkled her nose. ‘Did you step in something?’

I wondered for a nasty moment what she meant, but when I turned up my shoe the smear across the sole was just cow shite.

The question had been a long time coming. We’d gone for hours and miles in silence. At Uddingston, we were almost back into Glasgow.

‘Home,’ she said.

‘But it’s early.’ Stupid thing to say.

She understood me, though. ‘The factory? Is that where I should be? Sitting outside the factory?’

We went through Cambuslang, Burnside, Kingspark. I watched the names of the streets go by. I wasn’t sure what roads would take us to the factory, but that’s where I wished she would
go. I wanted to wind time back for her and make everything all right.

In a street of shops, I asked, ‘Could you stop here?’

When she pulled in, she didn’t switch off the engine. I listened to it and watched the people going by. The sun was shining; you’d have thought someone would be smiling.

‘It’s your car,’ I told her. ‘Go where you want. I’ll get out.’

She turned to look at me. I don’t mean just her head. She twisted round from the shoulders to get a good look at me.

‘Like you did before.’

It took me a moment to work it out. She meant the day before, that’s all it was, only the day before, outside the BBC in Queen Margaret Drive.

‘That’s right.’ I mean, Christ! why not?

‘You came back then. Why did you do that?’

I thought about it and lied. ‘I was drunk,’ I said.

‘No. You weren’t.’

‘Because I was stupid?’

It wasn’t easy to bring back the image of the look she’d given me when I said I’d get out and leave her, for it had gone almost as soon as it came, so quickly it would have
been easy to believe I’d imagined it. Yet I wouldn’t have been sorry to see it back again. Being looked at as if I’d crawled out from under a stone was better than the blank
nothingness of her expression now; you could have carved it out of ice.

‘Would you tell me one thing before you go?’ she asked. ‘Why did you drive the car away?’

Another question that had been a long time coming.

For want of any better answer, I told her about the week’s lying time and how her husband, Mr Bernard, had fired me.

She looked at me in disbelief. ‘That was all?’

That and having no future and no home.

‘He called me Mr Gas,’ I offered.

I’d been right about one thing. Grey stone, bow windows, the Mortons lived in just the kind of house I’d imagined for her. The gates were open and she took the car into the drive,
pulled up close to the garage and switched off. Here at the side of the house it was quiet. The garage doors were wood with four little windowpanes on either side at the top. You’d think
someone with a factory would have a metal door on his garage. One of the glass panes was cracked. I listened to the engine ticking as it cooled, and thought surely now had to be the time to jump
out and run for it. A goodbye speech, so far as I could see, wouldn’t be expected.

‘Have you any money?’ she asked.

‘What?’

‘No, of course you haven’t. I’ll find something.’ I stared at her. ‘You can’t just wander off without a penny.’ She opened the door and started to get
out. ‘Don’t worry, he won’t be here.’

The hall was long and narrow and, when my eyes adjusted to the dimness after the sunshine outside, I saw a stair going up and another that curled in a tight spiral down into the gloom of what
must have been a basement. I leaned on the rail and peered down, but the stairs went out of sight before they got to whatever was down there. I took a couple of steps down, changed my mind and came
up. I wandered from one end of the hall to the other and stood looking up to the first-floor landing. Whatever she was doing up there, she was taking her time. I imagined her rummaging through a
drawer for a purse, the way she might to pay the milkman. Maybe she was trying to decide how much, putting some of the coins back. Tired of thinking that way, I opened a door and the room beyond
was flooded with sunshine.

There was a table covered in papers, so big it filled the whole middle of the floor, and glass doors on the far wall. Though it was the ground floor, there was a balcony beyond the glass and I
could see the tops of trees. A folded partition at the back gave a view into a second room with fat dark leather chairs you’d sink into, and beside them little tables with mats. An arch
opened on to a third space with a desk and a wall lined with shelves crammed with books. Curiosity made me go in to see what kind of books they were, and I was reading the titles when her voice
behind me said, ‘Oh, this is where you are, then.’

‘I wasn’t touching anything.’

‘The books belonged to his father. Bernard’s not much of a reader.’

‘Nice.’ Nice, all the same, I meant; nice to have so many. ‘You’d never be short of something to read.’

She frowned at the shelves. ‘I never saw Papa Morton with a book. He had his stroke just before I met Bernard. After we were married, everyone took it for granted I’d look after him,
maybe because I’d been a nurse. I came back from my honeymoon to this house.’

‘It’s a nice house,’ I said. What did I imagine I was trying to tell her? That she’d done well for herself? What did I know? I was only eighteen. The good thing was that
she didn’t pay any attention. Still frowning at the shelves, she might not even have heard me.

‘The first time I saw him lying in bed he seemed old to me, but that’s because I was young. He was only in his fifties. It was years before he died.’

Afterwards she gave me money and I took it. I stood in the street outside her gate and told myself I’d taken it because I didn’t know what else to do, and I went over ways I might
have refused, gracefully so that she would have been impressed; and then I thought, No, you took it because you had no money and it’s a long way to walk home.

And after all when it came to it I did go on foot half across the city. I walked because before anything else I had to get to a main road; and then I walked because I wasn’t tired. As I
walked from one stop to another, I checked the route numbers for the buses and trams. They went by me halfway between one stop and the next. I couldn’t be bothered joining a queue to wait,
walking was nothing to me. At last, I came to a stop and people were getting on a bus. I’d walked past it before I glanced up and saw its destination; and then I got on as if that was what
I’d been waiting for.

I’d assumed I’d have to talk my way upstairs, but there wasn’t anyone behind the counter. Dully, from behind the door that led to the factory, machinery clattered. Saturday was
a working day. A phone rang somewhere through in the back and when it stopped I heard the murmur of a woman’s voice answering. Maybe the receptionist had gone somewhere quieter to practise
her sneer. I took the stairs two at a time before I lost my nerve.

The left-hand door lay open and I could see a filing cabinet with folders lying on top and one of the drawers pulled out. The middle door was Mr Bernard’s. I knocked and waited. I mean,
there wasn’t any question of me bursting in. It was my hope that this was going to be a pretty low-key and civilised discussion. I knocked again and a voice inside made a noise that might
have been ‘Come in’.

The man behind the desk had his nose in a pile of papers. When he looked up, I recognised the fat bookkeeper. ‘Yes?’ he said vaguely. Behind the thick glasses, his eyes looked
unfocused, as if he was still absorbed in a column of figures. He shoved fingers through hair already standing on end.

‘I wanted to see Mr Morton.’

‘So? Can I help you?’

‘No.’ I started to move back out of the room.

‘Wait!’ The high-pitched voice soared into a bat squeak that stopped me in my tracks. ‘What makes you assume – Anything to do with this business, I can deal with it. You
understand? Any . . . single . . . thing.’

If there’s anything I hate, it’s having an idea spelled out to me one word at a time. A teacher’s trick that says, If I speak any faster, someone like you will be too stupid to
take it in.

‘It isn’t about work,’ I told him.

He shook his head as if he didn’t believe me. ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ He gave a flap of the hand, which looked petulant except that when the tips of his fingers hit
the desk they hit it hard.

‘I wasn’t here for long,’ I said. One week paid for in cash; thanks to him, come to think of it.

Then he did a funny thing. He looked down at the desk again and began tidying the papers he’d been working on. ‘Give me a minute,’ he said, which kept me there. He squared the
pile, tapping it at the sides and top and bottom. He had big, puffy hands with fingers swollen as if they had too much blood pumped into them. He pushed the papers to one side so that the desk in
front of him was clear, and when he looked up I saw that he had recognised me.

‘What have you done with her?’

I stared at him. It hadn’t occurred to me that the whole factory would know what had happened.

‘Is Mr Morton here?’

‘You can talk to me.’ When I didn’t answer, he said, ‘He’s not here.’

‘Has he gone home?’ The edge of panic in my voice surprised me.

‘Is that where Eileen is?’

‘Eileen?’

‘Bernard’s wife,’ he said impatiently.

Then I remembered her story about her father organising the washing of the dishes. ‘Eileen and Mother’, she’d remembered him saying – and that was how I’d learned
Mrs Morton’s first name.

‘What happened yesterday? What did she say to you? Did she ask you to take her away? You can tell me.’

I shook my head. It was what I had come to explain, that it was all my fault, but not to him.

‘I’m Mr Norman, Mr Bernard’s older brother.’

Fine, I’d call him in evidence. He could tell his brother that I hadn’t even known her name.

‘Where has she been all this time?’ he asked.

‘Nowhere.’

‘Nowhere all night?’

‘We slept in the car.’

‘The two of you?’ Disbelief puffed out his cheeks in a long breath. ‘She’s gone off her head. Where was this?’

‘On the way back from Edinburgh.’

He threw up his hands as if to fend off any more. ‘But now she’s at home?’ I nodded. ‘What are you here for?’

‘I wanted to tell Mr Bernard his wife didn’t do anything wrong. I drove the car away. She couldn’t stop me. He shouldn’t blame her. Where is he?’

‘Not here.’ I took it that meant Mr Bernard had gone home. Before I could say anything, he asked, ‘What made you steal the car?’

I was so worked up I didn’t hear him properly. I blundered on. ‘It was all my fault. From the minute I got into the car she kept saying, “Go back, go back!” But I
wouldn’t.’

‘Why did you take it? You must have had a reason.’

‘I didn’t care about the car,’ I said.

‘Why take it, then?’ But as he waited I couldn’t think of any reason he would understand. ‘Have you brought it back?’

‘To the factory? What for?’ I wasn’t trying to upset him. I honestly couldn’t imagine what he was talking about.