My father dated my mother for twelve years before he finally got around to asking for her hand. By that time, she’d developed a habit of clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth – a tic of her biological clock – as if to remind him that time was running out on her dream of having a big family. She was thirty-seven when she had me and, according to my Uncle Brendan, forty-one when she accepted that I would be an only child. The tutting stuck, though, as a continual prompt for a question that came a decade or so too late.
Marriage probably just slipped my dad’s mind. Since his early twenties he’s been a collector of anatomical oddities, both professionally and privately, so it’s more than likely that it was just distraction as he set up the display of surgical instruments, or absent-mindedness as he labelled the bell-jars of aborted fallow deer. If Mum had just asked him, I would be eight or nine years older and surrounded by siblings. Instead, she clung to the traditions of her Presbyterian upbringing even in the absence of any religious conviction: the man must ask.
Uncle Brendan told me all this two years ago at the whisky-soaked wedding of my cousin Gerard, his own son, and I tell it all to Maddie on the walk from her dad’s flat to dinner with my parents. It will explain the drift to Dad’s sentences, and the noises from Mum that bring him back on topic. It will lessen her shock at the detailed anatomical sketches on the walls of the dining room and prepare her for Mum’s ability to studiously avoid phrasing any attempt at conversation as a question.
We begin with prosciutto-wrapped melon pieces and a short, polite tut-tut from Mum. It only lasts a second and could slip, unnoticed, between sentences. At the sound of it, Dad stops folding and unfolding the corner of his napkin and looks across at Maddie.
‘So, Madeline,’ he says, ‘you’ve just finished your exams as well, I take it? As well as Robert, that is.’
She nods, smiles. It never occurred to me that her name must be Madeline, that Maddie is a shortening. Maybe it never dawned on her that my name was Robert either. I bloody well hope not, anyway. Dad is the only one who uses my full name.
‘Maddie is a year behind me,’ I say. ‘But she did five subjects this year.’
‘I would imagine,’ Mum says, ‘that Maddie is applying to university and that she could tell us all about the wonderful things she’s going to learn and the wonderful career she’s going to have.’
We all look at Maddie. She wears an olive-green summer dress, with a black shawl over her shoulders. The gold necklace that I gave her for her seventeenth birthday, a fortnight ago, hangs around her neck. The treble-clef pendant rests in the shallow at the base of her neck.
‘I’m hoping to go to university, yes,’ Maddie says, answering the unasked question rather than the asked one. ‘I’ve applied to a couple up here and a couple down in London. To do theatre studies.’
‘There must be a difference between that and drama, otherwise they wouldn’t bother calling them different things,’ Mum says. ‘There must be a difference.’
‘Theatre studies is more academic maybe, focused on the history and the theory of it all,’ Maddie says. ‘Whereas drama is more practical. The two are close, though, you’re right.’
Dad is concentrating on furrowing his melon rind with the edge of his spoon. He is thinking, no doubt, of the book on anatomists he is currently researching. Either that, or visitor numbers for the past year. The tongue-tut from Mum is louder this time. The spoon is laid to the side.
‘Are you musical, Madeline?’ he asks.
It is the wrong question. A short, sharp tut cuts over the top of it.
‘London will be a good city for theatre, anyway,’ Mum says. ‘Much better than Glasgow, I’d imagine. For both of you. Theatre and music.’
Maddie nods. ‘It’s a bit more expensive in terms of tuition fees and cost of living, and I’ll need to do well in my exams because I only have a conditional offer – ’
‘The newspaper says,’ Mum interrupts, ‘that the tuition fees are going up.’
‘That’s right. For England, at least. But that’s for students beginning next year, so I’m getting in just before it rises, hopefully. Unless I need to stay and do a sixth year at school to get enough qualifications.’
Mum stands, abruptly, and begins to stack the plates. The clash and clatter of crockery covers the noise she makes while she tidies. It is like an attempt at Morse code – short, short, long. An irregular rhythm.
‘Your spoons are very beautiful, Mrs Dillon,’ Maddie says, nodding up at the display case of silver on the wall. ‘Gorgeous.’
‘Thank you.’ Mum sets down the plates and moves over to the wall. ‘They’re mostly silver-plated, but there are some interesting ones up here.’
She plucks five from the rack that holds them and spreads them out on the table in front of Maddie as though setting the place for a quintet of desserts.
‘The first one that got me interested was this simple Victorian teaspoon, which was mixed in with a batch of vicious-looking surgical instruments that Douglas, Rab’s father, picked up at some auction or other.’ She smiles across at her husband, but he doesn’t seem to be listening. ‘It was the only object I could recognise among all the blades and gougers and – ’
‘She was taking the edge off my dad’s collection,’ I try, but nobody laughs.
‘And this one,’ my mum continues, ‘is double-struck, you see, with the design on the front and the back.’
‘Ah, it’s lovely,’ Maddie reaches a hand towards it but stops short of touching.
‘Then we have salt spoons. And this,’ Mum lifts one, ‘is a moustache spoon, with a guard on one side to protect the moustaches of Victorian gentlemen as they sup their soup. Isn’t that ingenious?’
As if suddenly aware that she might be boring Maddie, she gathers the spoons into the palm of her hand and slots them into position in their display case. Then she goes back to the task of clearing away the starter, her tongue clicking away at the roof of her mouth.
I turn to Maddie, to check that she’s surviving, and slip a hand beneath the table to grasp at her knee and give it a squeeze. The noise from my mum gets louder. Maddie flinches and tries to brush my hand away, but I keep it where it is and nod across towards Dad. The tut-tut is a prompt for him.
‘And your contract’s all sorted, is it, Robert?’ he asks, looking up on cue.
As she walks to the kitchen, Mum lets it be known that she disapproves of the question. This tut is designed to carry. She’s busy getting the lamb cutlets out of the oven, though, so I take the opportunity to answer Dad. It’ll give Maddie a break, at least.
‘Signed and sealed,’ I say. ‘The first album will be released early next year.’
‘It’s an exciting time.’ Maddie grins.
The recording contract is for the first album, with an option for a second. It took a bit of back-and-forth to agree the production budget and whatnot, because Pierce was assuming that the major label, the parent company, would be footing the bill but then the imprint, Agitate, kept on pleading poverty. What do I care about details like that, though? Let my manager handle that and sort out things like the publishing rights. If there are creases, he’s the one to iron them out.
‘As soon as we move down I can start in the studio,’ I say. ‘Try to get the whole thing recorded in the next few months, before the turn of the year, and then…’
‘Take on the world,’ Maddie finishes my sentence.
Dad stares at the gravy boat that Mum sets on the table, as if wondering what it could possibly be for. It was probably a wedding present, but he’s not noticed it properly these past nineteen years.
‘Pierce says that the advance will be enough to put us up in a hotel for the first while, with a small weekly allowance, but then we should start looking for somewhere more permanent. Not to buy, necessarily, until the royalties and that really begin coming in, but just somewhere more settled.’
There’s a meeting scheduled with an accountant. The idea is to set up a business account for the advance and then work out an allowance – a per diem – from that. Like pocket money. I asked Pierce what was stopping me from taking a hammer to the piggy bank and spending the lot of it and he just shrugged. Nothing, he said. Other than the fact that, once Pierce has taken his cut and all the bills, food, and accommodation are factored in, there’ll barely be enough for a piggy bank, never mind a hammer.
‘It sounds like a lot of expense, I would say,’ Mum says, bringing the potatoes through. ‘It must be, to keep two people fed and watered in London.’
‘I’ll get some sort of job,’ Maddie says. ‘As well as my student loan – ’
‘Just in the meantime,’ I cut in. ‘Until the album hits the shops.’
As she hands Maddie the carrots, Mum’s tongue tuts again.
‘Will you have enough money, the two of you?’ Dad asks.
I stay silent, because we’ve just answered that. There is no noise from Mum, though, so it must be the correct question. I spoon out some mint jelly and look at Maddie. ‘The record company puts up all the start-up costs. For production and marketing and whatever else,’ I say. ‘Until the sales come through.’
‘Those must be two of the least secure professions imaginable,’ Mum says. ‘A musician and an actress. Truly, there are probably statistics to prove it if you knew which expert to ask.’
‘Maddie doesn’t necessarily want to act,’ I reply. ‘Maybe just direct or work in the theatre in some other way. As long as she’s involved, y’know, then it’ll be worthwhile. And, in case you’ve forgotten, I’ve already got a contract. It’s secured.’
I wave my hand in the air, swinging an invisible contract from side to side. Dad, catching sight of it from across the table, blinks and looks down at his plate.
‘This is lamb, then, is it?’ he asks.
We lie on the bed in my attic room and stare at the shard of moon visible through the skylight. My jean-clad leg is folded over Maddie’s bare legs, but I make no moves beyond that.
‘I see what you mean about your mum’s clucking noises,’ she says. ‘She’s very beautiful for her age, though. You didn’t tell me that. Especially when she was animated – taking about her spoons.’
I frown, consider. My mum is in her mid-fifties, at the stage where her brown hair is beginning to thin and thread itself with grey. I’ve never thought of her as anything other than my mother, never had occasion to switch to thinking of her as Hannah Dillon.
‘You think so?’ I say. ‘It’s not something I’ve ever – ’
‘She’s got your green eyes,’ Maddie says. ‘Or you’ve got hers, maybe.’
Music plays softly from my laptop. It was Patti Smith, but now it’s shuffled on to some soppy shite that Maddie must’ve downloaded. If she hadn’t just turned to nestle against me, her head on my shoulder, I’d get up to change it.
‘Can I ask you, Rab…’ she begins.
‘Yes.’
‘Are you worried about moving to England?’
I try to crane my neck around to kiss her on the forehead, but can only brush across her temple. Strands of her blonde hair catch and trail against my lips. They smell of macadamia shampoo but taste of nothing. ‘No,’ I say. ‘We’ll be fine.’
‘Not because of us, though.’ She bites at her nails. The sound and shudder of it, next to my ear, is like the crack and rumble of thunder. ‘Because you’re a Scottish singer, right? But if you go down there then you lose that a little bit. If you write about Glasgow, you’ll be accused of no longer living here, and if you write about London then you’ll be called an outsider.’
I shrug. It stops her nail-biting.
‘And,’ she says, ‘Pierce wants you to sing about politics, doesn’t he? But is that Scottish politics, or English politics, or UK politics, or what?’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘Are you serious?’
Her legs disentangle themselves from mine and her head lifts from my shoulder. She sits up and crosses her legs beneath her on the mattress. I take the opportunity to flip on to my front and dangle off the side of the bed so that I can scroll through the music.
‘They’re all Conservatives down there, Rab. Maybe not in London, not fully, but in the countryside all around it. Surrey and Sussex and Suffolk and…’ She pauses. ‘Whereas up here we’re lefty-leaning. You know how many Tory MPs there are in Scotland?’
I shake my head, settle for Belle and Sebastian and push myself back up on to the bed. I’m curled in against Maddie now, with my head in her lap. She strokes at my hair.
‘One,’ she says. ‘There’s only one, right down in the Borders.’
‘Are you a closet Nationalist, then?’ I ask.
‘It depends.’ She stops stroking. ‘If it’s about identity or patriotism, about whether I feel Scottish or British, then I don’t care. Not at all. But if it’s about a value system, if it’s about whether I’d rather have a welfare state and a public-funded NHS and tuition provision for students, and if an independent Scotland can provide that, then I’ll proudly call myself Scottish, yes.’
‘You mean aye.’
‘What?’
‘You said yes; you meant aye.’
Maddie was too young to vote in the Scottish Parliament elections at the start of the month, but she took part in all the social media twittering about it and she seems to have convinced herself – along with the majority – into supporting the Scottish Nationalist Party. Her opinions tend to be a hundred and forty characters long.
Her face flickers into a frown. I smile and reach a hand up to cradle her cheek, but she leans away from it.
‘There are plenty of folk down south who aren’t in any way right-wing,’ I say. ‘Plenty of them even protest about the government cuts, like that march you went to, so – ’
‘But there’s a mandate.’ Maddie is still frowning.
I don’t know what the word means, not fully, so I settle for nodding.
‘They can cut those things because enough of the country supports or can be convinced to support them,’ Maddie continues. ‘Whereas a Scottish government doesn’t have public support for any of it, even if they wanted to. And independence would give us a chance to build, maybe, to dream – ’
‘There needs to be money for all those things, though.’
‘Absolutely. But it seems like the independence debate is all about national fucking pride, rather than just a discussion about how we could go about affording all those things. Building a Scottish state that truly represents the values of the Scottish people. On the Scandinavian model, maybe.’
‘How do we pay for it?’ I repeat.
‘North Sea oil,’ she says.
‘Would we not just be in the pocket of the oil companies, then?’
‘That would be the challenge, granted: keeping their influence out of the politics, even though we need their money. Especially because green energy’s so important to the economy as well.’
‘And what about all those people, down south, who don’t want the Tories?’
‘Newcastle can join us, if it likes. Wales too.’
‘Not Manchester, though?’
Some of the anger seems to have seeped out of her. She twists my hair through her fingers and gently – from her throat – hums along to ‘The State I Am In’.
‘What’s all this got to do with us moving to London, though?’ I ask.
‘Because…’ she tugs at my fringe ‘… I don’t want you to lose your decency, Rab. Like, if you start making money hand-over-fist, I don’t want you to develop a sense of entitlement or – ’
‘Don’t forget your roots, is that it?’
‘Not your roots.’ She smiles. ‘You’re as middle-class as they come, mate.’
‘What, then?’
‘Don’t forget that it’s people, not profit, that matters.’
I grin, circling my arms around her waist and wrestling her down towards me. We kiss, and I can taste the sourness of the stewed plums we had for dessert. My breath catches as we pull apart. ‘I love you, you know,’ I say.
‘Is that because I keep you right?’
I shake my head. It takes me a second to place the reason, though. It’s that she’ll sit through dinner with my parents, swallowing all their eccentricities and Mum’s stinking stewed plums without complaining, but then come upstairs and get to the point of tearing hair out – mine, of course – about politics and Scottish independence. But it’s also that she turned up to support me at the showcase gig even though she knew that my friends – that Ewan – would be there, and that she didn’t just clap and cheer, but she told me to hurry up when I started fucking about on stage. It’s that she’s honest to the point of being brazen, but with enough softness about her to carry it off.
‘It’s because you’re beautiful, to the point where I still have to do a double-take when I wake up with you beside me,’ I say. Which is true as well, but not what prompted me to tell her I loved her, here and now.
‘My dad once told me,’ Maddie says, ‘that the reason he married my mum was because being with her was as easy as being alone. I was about twelve when he told me that. And for a while I thought it was a really sad thought, but then I started to think that what he was saying was that they were entirely comfortable with one another, that they could completely be themselves…’
I stay quiet. She looks beyond me, over my shoulder, with her eyes unfocused. I hold her hand in mine, but it is limp and doesn’t respond when I tighten my grip.
‘Two years later, he left us,’ she continues. ‘And I thought back to what he’d said. If it’s as easy being with her as being alone, then why be alone? And did the fact that he left mean that he didn’t like her, or didn’t like himself…’ her voice drops to a whisper ‘…or didn’t like me?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘No, it doesn’t mean that.’
‘No.’ She shakes her head. ‘It means that marriage was convenient, at the time. There was no struggle to it, no obstacles to overcome, no difficulties in getting to fully know one another. There was no challenge about it, maybe.’
‘Right,’ I say, leaning closer to her so that her eyes focus on my face.
‘I love you too, Rab,’ she says. ‘But only if we keep each other right, OK? Only if we challenge each other.’
‘Deal,’ I say, sealing it with a stolen kiss. ‘There’s nothing like conditional love.’