a Brillo-pad. Smelling like a grape harvest. Just about conscious. But he kept asking for Jack Laidlaw. Must see Jack Laidlaw. Porter in there is one of my tipsters. You know? Well, he’s heard me mention you before. So he thinks he better let me know. But I wouldn’t think there’s anything there for me. He’s probably just got the dt’s. No offence, Jack. I mean, you’re not Errol Flynn. But you’ve probably got the edge on spiders and pink elephants.’
‘Any wounds?’ Laidlaw said.
‘Didn’t seem to be. But I didn’t get too much information. He’s a trier, this. But he’s not too hot on the verbals.’
‘When did you get this call, Eddie?’
‘Got it at the pub here. Five minutes ago. I thought I’d better let you know before I leave. I want to look in at the Vicky. The Paddy Collins thing. I might get some famous last words. Anyway, it’s up to you, Jack.’
‘Thanks, Eddie. I owe you one.’
‘Aye. When the revolution comes, I’d like a press-card. Cheers, Jack.’
‘Cheers.’
Laidlaw put down the phone. The sound of Eddie’s voice had been an injection through the ear. Things were happening in the city. But he had guests. Well, Ena had guests. He tried to be fair and decided they wouldn’t miss him. His absence would probably be a relief.
Any weekend that Laidlaw wasn’t working was pre-arranged for him. Familiar with the anti-social hours policemen kept, Ena had learned to try and compensate. If Laidlaw insisted on treating the calendar the way an alcoholic treats liquor – big benders of absence, brief domestic drying-outs – she was determined to ensure that his off-duty time was spent exclusively with her.
She deployed baby-sitters like chessmen – check, mate. She counteracted his thirst for the streets of Glasgow with events carefully bottled like home-made wine, each neatly labelled in advance. ‘Friday – Frank and Sally coming.’ ‘Saturday – Mike and Aileen’s party.’ ‘Saturday – Al Pacino film at La Scala. Baby-sitter arranged.’
Tonight was ‘Friday – Donald and Ria.’ It wasn’t one of her best vintages, a mild cabbagey flavour that never got you high but which might, Laidlaw suspected, rot the social taste-buds over a prolonged period so that you couldn’t tell a bromide from the elixir of life. He tried not to have anything against Donald and Ria. It was just that the four of them together gave him the feeling of being involved in field-work on group sedation.
Besides, maybe it was someone who had done him a favour. Maybe it was someone who was dying. Nobody was dying in the room he had left. Maybe four or so of them were dead. But nobody was dying.
He was wearing a red polo-neck and black slacks. Reaching into the cupboard in the hall, he took out his denim jacket and put it on. He might as well announce his intention to the committee. They’d veto it, of course, but he’d made his decision. He felt guilty but that was a familiar feeling.
3
From Simshill in Cathcart, where Laidlaw lived, to the Royal Infirmary in Cathedral Street was a short trip but a big distance. Fortunately, the architecture changed in stages, like decompression chambers, so that you didn’t get the bends.
One half of the first gate was open yet and he drove in. A lot of cars were in the parking area but there was plenty of room. Locking the car, he was struck again by the size of the place, three huge linked units, each with its own imposing dome. It seemed to him a castle of black stone. It made illness appear not a leveller but an accolade that admitted you to a Gothic aristocracy.
Across the courtyard was the single-storey casualty department like a gatehouse where they examined your credentials. He went in. It was after eleven.
The hallway was the parking place for the blue leather invalid-chairs, maybe thirty of them. On one of them a boy of twenty or so was sitting. But he wasn’t an invalid. He looked ill enough to chew railings. The slight skinning on his right cheek only accentuated his appearance of hardness. He was nursing a light jacket the shoulders of which were black with blood, like the patch on a Wimpey reefer. He was waiting for someone.
‘Hey, you,’ he said as Laidlaw came in. ‘Gonny give us a fag?’
Laidlaw looked over curiously. He recognised drink but not drunkenness and the residual aggression from a fight not lost, the adrenalin spin-off that could be captioned ‘Who’s next?’ Laidlaw turned towards the doorway to casualty.
‘Hey, you! Big man. Ah’m talkin’ to you. Gi’es a fag!’ Laidlaw went over.
‘Here, son,’ he said. ‘So far you’ve only managed mild abrasions. Is this you trying for intensive care?’
The boy looked momentarily blank at the medical references but the tone was Esperanto.
The boy said, ‘Come on. Ah asked a wee favour.’
‘So don’t make it sound like a threat.’
Laidlaw gave him a cigarette.
‘You put the tipped end in your mouth. Then you light the other bit.’
The boy was smiling. Laidlaw turned to the casualty room. It is a single, long, arched place, both basic and ornate, like a Victorian nissen hut. Laidlaw entered it like a time-warp.
The first things he noticed were a couple of ghosts of his youth, two constables whose faces were fresh-laid eggs. Near them stood a group wearing doctors’ white coats. Laidlaw hoped they were students. All of them, policemen and doctors, looked young enough to have been given their uniforms for Christmas. Suddenly, Laidlaw was Rip Van Winkle.
He checked the treatment room on the right. While two nurses looked on, a doctor was remonstrating with a boy who was stripped to the waist. From hairline to belt, the boy was blood. The red made the place look like a dressing-room for one of the more preposterous Elizabethan tragedies, say Titus Andronicus.
‘No problem!’ the boy was saying.
Physically, he seemed to be alright. Laidlaw could see a long cut on the back of his neck and nothing else. He was obviously enjoying that taste of the heroic your own spilled blood can give you. Probably the worst thing they could do for him would be to wash him clean. Then he would have to settle for himself again. Laidlaw didn’t know him but perhaps he would.
Starting opposite the treatment room is a row of cubicles. They presented Laidlaw, as he went, with a succession of tableaux that might have come from a contemporary mystery play. A girl whose eyes were still in shock was holding a bloodstained bedspread, waiting for someone or something. There was a young man with a left eye like a piece of bad fruit. He was protesting hysterically about injustice while a doctor attended him. A woman was crying while her arm was being bandaged. ‘He gives me some awfu’ kickings,’ she was saying. A middle-aged man was explaining to a nurse, ‘It’s a kinda shifting pain,’ while two young policemen looked on. Laidlaw recognised a familiar art, that of postponing arrest by young policemen through the contraction of sudden, mysterious maladies.
Cubicle E, the one Laidlaw knew to be used for delousing, was empty but showed signs of recent use. He recognised nobody, except perhaps the two plain-clothesmen who had just come in. He didn’t know them as individuals but he knew that style of moving on tramlines of professional preoccupation. They merged with the rest of the scene as subtly as Mormons.
Looking back along the room, Laidlaw found nothing specific to him, only the city processing its Friday night pain. The place was a confessional. You came here to admit to frailty, brittle bones, thin skin, frangible organs – the pathetic, haphazard machinery we make bear the weight of our pretensions.
Most of all, you came to admit to blood. It was everywhere here, on the people, the swabs, the floor, the coats of the doctors. Like a betrayal, it leaked out of the spurious certainties we make of our natures. Like honesty, it was difficult to look at.
Laidlaw felt here more strongly what he had against that other room he had just