Now the Blood is in the Room

MARCUS COMES BACK from the funeral. The country has made him vicious and, for a few days, very quietly himself. My heart goes out to him and this well of affection surprises me and puts the whole office out of kilter—as if anything at all could fall in to it. Marcus’s silence is worrying. He is only harmless when he starts to speak.

He is looking at me quietly when my phone starts to ring. I lift the receiver and hear nothing but a distant shouting from another line. Then a voice says ‘Goodbye’, and it sounds like my father might, if he were ever let near a phone.

‘Is that you?’ I say.

‘No,’ says the voice. It is my father and I feel like I have been watching one movie and it has turned into three other ones, all of them real.

‘It is you.’

‘Yes,’ he says and his reasonable tone sends a dreadful hope swimming like an eel down the line, the hope that my father has come back home.

‘Alloa,’ he says.

‘Is the mother all right?’

‘Motherwell nine,’ he says.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Forfar, five. Fife four.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Is there anything wrong?’

‘Hearts six. Montrose nil.’

‘I know that,’ I say.

‘Cowdenbeath,’ he says and hangs up.

‘So am I, Da. So am I.’

The room is full of dead people. Frank is looking at his photographs. My father is whispering on the dead line. Marcus stands at the LoveWagon’s door with his own father staring out of his face at me and smiling, with lips that say ‘So what is life doing to me now?’

Damien stumbles in wearing a trench coat, a cigarette clamped in his teeth. What movie is he in today? Columbo? The Big Sleep? He looks out at us through his hangover and twitches, as if every move were a jump cut from A Bout de Souffle. Perhaps we have gone too far. I look to Frank but he is still with his photographs and seems to be stuck in a freeze frame. Jo has switched off. I just watch.

So this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a:

‘Goodnight John Boy,’ says the LoveWagon, after half an hour of corn grits and whining.

‘Goodnight Grandma,’ says Marcus, who has finally made his move. He has spent the meeting making efficient little replies and conciliatory, useful suggestions. He has voiced carefully modulated concern about next year.

‘We could do that next year,’ he says. ‘That’s if … the shows goes ahead next year.’

He might as well have pointed out a bomb under the table. The eyes around the room invert, like the eyes of pregnant women, like the eyes of men who know they will survive, but not with honour.

He might as well have pointed out a bomb and said, ‘Well I think it’s just a suitcase.’ No-one looks under the table. No-one looks at anyone else. Marcus looks at everybody, just for badness—because we all thought we were the only one to know about the bomb, if it is a bomb. We all thought we could get out on time. No point creating a jam at the door.

Except for Jo, of course, whose sources are excellent. ‘Well count me out,’ she says. ‘I’m off to Sport.’

So it is real. The rumours are true. There will be no next year. It is real—some of us will go up and more will go out and they’ll paint the set and call the show something else, like ‘The New Improved LoveQuiz’, or ‘The LuvKwiz’, or ‘An Interesting Career Move By Someone You Have Never Met’.

‘But hang on,’ says Marcus. ‘Is it really a bomb? It looks more like an opportunity to me!’

‘Here we go,’ says Frank as Marcus rolls up his sleeves, spits on his hands, takes up the hatchet and starts splitting hairs.

In the canteen the rumour takes hold. The show is axed. We take our trays in silence and queue up for food that tastes like our own lives cooked up, cooled down and reheated. I have paranoid peas, with manipulated mashed potatoes and a web of intrigue on the side. Frank has Pork du Prince a la Machiavelle with chicanery chips and stuff-you-stuffing in a worried gravy. The researchers have Fuck You Foie Gras and Sole on the Dole. None of us can face desert.

We talk about Marcus. Everyone who used to like him doesn’t like him anymore. Jo says,

‘His father just died, for heaven’s sake.’

‘So?’ I say.

I realise that I always disliked Marcus’s father, dead and all as he is, which is another thing we could never talk about, because Marcus thought that his father was the most dignified human being who ever checked the sky for rain. He thought that he was still travelling towards him, expiating, vindicating, all that shite.

He used to tell stories about the old man, some humiliation at the hands of a grocer, some slight suffered in a bar, the conversation they had when it was all too late. He’d look at me and say:

‘How can you get away from all that?’

Now he has nothing to get away from and nowhere left to go. There might have been something commendable about his journey—if you are interested in boy’s journeys, which I am not. Marcus was always undergoing some kind of heartbreak with a woman he didn’t love anyway. Every now and then, you’d hear him on the phone saying ‘Sorry …’ as if to say ‘I just wish I wasn’t so complicated’, and the old man doddered out of his face in a disapproving, proud kind of way Marcus’s father hates us all and he hates me just for fun.

When we get back to the office he comes out of the LoveWagon’s door in a post-coital haze. He is singing:

‘Top Cat

The most effectual

Top Cat

Whose intellectual

Close friends get to

Call him TC’

But instead of baiting him, as I should, I find myself touching him on the arm. Shit.