There’s no point in telling you lies by omission. I bumped into Kenny F again, in the Crit, when it was still more of a fishermen’s pub. Before all these Gaelic actors and journalists appeared. Nothing against them, it’s just that it’s a small pub. For a second I thought he’d be having a Virgin Mary, waiting for Mairi to finish work, round the corner.
No, he was looking like he looked ten years before. Eyes red, everything red, hair gone longer. Hair is back in fashion with Italian football stars but his was looking kind of forgotten. He held out his glass and I nodded to get another one put in it. Why not? If he was on it, he was on it. I asked for a pint of stout. We went over to a corner. There was going to be a story.
I was going to ask him to save it. If he was on the piss again, it wouldn’t be a short one. He was straight into it. No introductions.
She must have been crazy to think she could hide it. OK, it was very early on but he was pretty sure of the signs. She was supposed to be going on another course. Pretty plausible, with all that new tech and her promotion board coming up. Adapting this database programme for the office needs. Fucking brownie points.
He’d a feeling though, even before someone from the office asked how Mairi was. Real concerned note.
Click.
To him, she was in East Kilbride, on a course. She’d even phoned him. Said it was going all right. To them, she was on the sick.
It was me who was slow, taking a sip of my stout. I thought we were talking about something on the side.
Kenny knew I hadn’t got it.
I could have coped with her having a fling, he said. I couldn’t have shared her but I’d have waited to get her back. Now he could have her back but he didn’t want a blone who could do away with their baby. She hadn’t even been going to tell him. Just wanted to get back to her fucking development programme. No choice, she said, since he wasn’t working. Doing up the house. Debts building up. No choice. They’d have another chance later.
Not with me, you won’t. That’s what he’d said. He’d gone straight out the door. A woman’s right to choose, he said. Well, a guy could choose, too.
He was choosing now. He’d found a place to crash in town, wherever there was a couch. All of us too fucking old for other people’s floors. She could have the house and the croft and every other thing. It was her family croft, anyway. And she was earning the dosh. She could fucking pay someone to do the last of the finishing.
I was thinking of my own blur of shifts and snatched sleep. The things you’re not proud of, the shouting and the huffs when the bairn’s asleep.
But then there was the photo Gabriele took when I fell asleep but Anna was turning the pages for herself. She was just reading on before I even knew she could. When I was knackered from the shiftwork. And you knew then you could hold it together. Maybe not for keeps but maybe for long enough.
I turned back to the eyes of a guy I grew up with. The formative years. I couldn’t ask him back to our house. Couldn’t be that much of a bastard.
I put another dram in his glass and walked home.