10

Joyce was waiting for him in the Arrivals lounge.

She’d changed her appearance since he’d seen her last. She’d shed the black clothes and the aura of existentialist gloom in favour of faded old blue jeans, an oversized T-shirt with a camouflage pattern, tan sneakers with yellow-and-brown striped laces. She still wore shades, but the lenses were royal blue and tiny, not big and black. Her hair had been cropped short and dyed blonde. The style gave her oval face an undernourished quality. She threw herself at him energetically, clutching him hard.

‘Eddie Eddie, oh Eddie.’

He held her tightly. He had a sense of love, like oxygen flowing to his head; it surprised him how easy it was to love her, because he often imagined absence and distance would eventually erode his feelings, and hers too, but that hadn’t come about. And now all at once he was goddam tearful. It was what happened as you got older, he’d noticed. You sniffled more readily at things, choked up at reunions and soft-hearted movie sequences and farewells. One day you’d be a sentimental old fart in an armchair crying into a Kleenex during It’s A Wonderful Life.

‘I’m just so damned glad you came. Hold me and don’t let go, Eddie.’

She felt thin, fragile. He wondered how her life had been lived in the five years since he’d seen her. They were neither of them letter writers. They spoke a couple of times a year by phone, and that was it. In New York he thought about her, missed her – but then, like everyone else, he got immersed in the currents of his own life and the promises he made to himself about calling Joyce more often were pushed to a backburner where they simmered. And that was sad, because the years were rolling inexorably away.

Then he was thinking of how far he’d drifted from Jackie Mallon too, and he wanted to say something to Joyce about him, but he was groping for words. Jackie floated before him, the thick eyebrows and the upright walk that was almost military at times, the cheeky dazzle of the smile and the habit the old man had of cupping a cigarette as he smoked, as if he were afraid of a wind blowing it away. It might have been a mannerism born in the drab post-war years, when cigarettes were precious.

I didn’t have enough time with him, Eddie thought, I invented him from memories. And he was suddenly consumed by anger. Somebody had killed the old man, and that fucker, whoever he was, would goddam have to pay in the end –

He caught himself in mid-rage, breathed a couple of times deeply, sought calm. Don’t go off the deep end. The police are looking for the killer. They’ll find him.

Joyce said, ‘I’m all cried out. Talk to me about the living, Eddie. Talk to me about Claire. Tell me about my gorgeous wee nephew.’

He spoke about Claire. He brought her up to date on Mark and the girls who chased him. She linked her arm in his and they walked across the terminal, which was new and shiny, a gilded palace that corresponded to nothing in his memory of how it had been years ago, a drab matchbox where you half-expected the only craft permitted to land would be 1940s Spitfires in need of fuel to continue the war against Jerry.

They went outside. It was dark and the night air warm, almost tropical. ‘It feels like Miami,’ Eddie said. Any subject but their father.

‘We’re having an extremely rare heatwave, Eddie. Enjoy it while it lasts. It’ll probably be pishing rain again in a day or so. My car’s over there,’ and she pointed to her left.

The conversational transition from murder to the weather; it was wonderful comfort. How would people live their lives without a vocabulary of weather?

He said, ‘You look … different. You were all dark last time. Your clothes, hair …’

‘Oh, that was my black self. My tragic period. The troubled divorcee, et cetera. You think this haircut’s too flashy for a woman almost forty? Too gallus?’

‘Gallus?’

‘Have you forgotten your Glasgow patois, Eddie?’

‘Gallus,’ he said, remembering. ‘Wait. Brazen, swaggering.’

‘See, it’s like riding a bike. You never forget.’ She led him across the car park. ‘I love you, Eddie. We’re too careless, the way we let ourselves drift.’

‘I know, I know.’

She gripped his hand. He had a strange disorienting moment, as if he’d come to a city where he’d never been, and was talking with a woman he’d never met in his life – and then this web of illusion blew away and he was himself again, except for the fact that he had no idea of time, neither day nor date. Was it still Wednesday? Was it only this morning at 3.30 US Eastern time when Joyce had phoned him in New York? Time zones, loss of hours. He tried to calculate, but gave up.

Joyce unlocked a car, an old dark blue Mini. ‘Just stick your bag in the back.’

He got inside. The space was small and his knees were jammed against the glove compartment. Joyce drove out of the lot to the freeway. Motorway: he corrected himself. He looked at the blue signs pointing to Glasgow. He couldn’t recollect a motorway linking the airport to the city. It was new. So were the bright tidy suburbs he saw from the window. And light. So much light.

‘When did they do all this?’ he asked, nodding at the housing estates.

‘Who knows? Glasgow’s a constant work in progress, Eddie.’

What had he expected? Everything the same, preserved in aspic? He thought: I don’t recognize the city of my birth.

‘We’re right up there these days with the high-flyers,’ Joyce said. ‘Milan. Paris. We’re dead cosmopolitan now, Eddie. No more soggy tomato sandwiches washed down with cups of nasty instant Nescafé. We’ve crossed into the promised land of croissants and cappuccino. We’re Europe, Eddie.’

‘And you – you’re still educating the young?’ he asked.

‘What else would I do?’

Joyce, like Flora had done, taught school; she drummed Romantic poetry into the heads of fourteen-year-olds in a school in the Southside of the city. Once, Eddie remembered, she’d announced that the work was too exhausting for a mere human. These kids to whom she force-fed Wordsworth had enough problems understanding the lyrics of fucking Boyzone, for Christ’s sake.

She drove in silence for a couple of miles.

‘Did you know I identified him, Eddie? At least what was left of him. Did I tell you that?’

‘I didn’t know. I’m sorry.’

‘Who needs more raw material for bad dreams? I’ve got some already.’ She flicked her cigarette into the night and it was whipped away in a quick riot of sparks.

Eddie Mallon had seen the violent dead too many times, the faces of clerks shotgunned in robberies, the heads of people blown off for chump-change in filling stations. He touched his sister’s hand and wondered why anyone had asked her, the stricken daughter, to ID the corpse. They might have been tactful and asked one of Jackie’s friends, somebody hardened by the streets. But no. In their insensitivity or haste they’d turned to the daughter.

Is this your dad? Is this mess you see before you Jackie Mallon?

‘Did the cops tell you anything?’ he asked. ‘Do you know if they have any ideas about who killed him, or why?’

‘I just remember they asked me to look at the body. There were so many people drifting in and out, suits, uniforms, I was hysterical in a kind of slow-motion way. I remember a guy drove me home after I’d been to the morgue. He was nice. He asked me if I wanted to go for a drink with him any time I felt the need to talk.’

‘He’s a master of timing, this character,’ Eddie said. ‘What did you tell him?’

‘I said call me in a month or two. But secretly I was flattered because he was drop-dead in a kind of little-boy-lost way. Any other time I would have said yes without thinking.’

‘The last time you said yes without thinking you ended up marrying the guy,’ Eddie said.

‘Just as I’d forgotten all about Harry Haskell, you go and remind me. I wish you could do something about that American accent.’

‘Am I supposed to sound like a guy who’s been selling newspapers outside –’ and he fumbled for a location’– St Enoch Station all his life?’

‘Sorry to tell you this, Eddie, but there’s no such station any more. Shut down long ago …’

A streetlight illuminated her face a second. She lit another cigarette. She looked, he thought, very young. A person too young to have her kind of history – a family hewn apart, a marriage that had been disastrous from the beginning, a murdered father.

‘You wanna hear my American?’ she asked.

Eddie Mallon said, ‘I have a choice?’

‘Hey, it’s your loss, buddy.’

‘That’s bad, Joyce.’

‘Bad as in good?’

‘As in terrible.’

They’d slipped into banter, he thought. Steer clear of the real subject. Digress. He looked at his watch but the damn thing had stopped. ‘I need to call Claire. She worries when I have to fly.’

‘Phone from my place,’ Joyce said. ‘I just remembered the man’s name.’

‘What man?’

‘The one that drove me home from the morgue. McWhinnie. Charles, I think. Detective-Sergeant. Posh Glasgow accent. He said yes instead of aye and didn’t drop his gs at the end of -ing words. Classy, eh?’

‘Very,’ he said.

The car left the motorway and headed into the east end of the city, where Eddie had been born and raised; suddenly streets were darker, tenements overbearing and the occasional streetlamp was missing, presumed vandalized. Stores were shuttered, bars closed. The only place open was a fish and chip shop. Eddie saw a fat man behind the counter toss a chip in the air and, like a trained sea-lion, catch it in his mouth on the way down.

Joyce turned the car into Onslow Drive and parked outside the house that had been the Mallon family home in another lifetime.

Eddie said, ‘I thought we were going to your flat. Why are we stopping here?’

‘I want to see how Senga’s bearing up,’ Joyce said, and stepped out of the car.

Eddie didn’t move.

He gazed at the garden, which was a tangle, a jungle of shrub. He stared at the windows, half-expecting to see a curtain drawn back and his mother’s face appear there, or the shadow of his father pass in front of a pane. He imagined Flora calling, You finished your homework, Eddie? Or the sound of Joyce practising scales she could never master on the old upright piano in the living room. Doh ray me fah clunk, the lid slammed down in frustration and Joyce running upstairs to her room and Jackie shouting after her, You won’t learn to play the bloody piano by hiding in your room, young lady.

I don’t want to get out of the car and go inside the house, he thought. Jackie’s Daily Express would be lying on the kitchen table and Flora might be peeling onions under running water and maybe some of Jackie’s friends would be in the sitting room, laughing at a joke or talking in a low masculine rumble Eddie found impenetrable. And Flora would say, If you’re looking for your dad he’s in the front room with his business associates, so-called.

The dead walk this house.

Ghosts. Including the spectre of young Eddie Mallon.

‘Come on, Eddie,’ Joyce called. ‘You’ll like her. Don’t look so worried.’

It wasn’t the prospect of Senga that troubled him here. He stepped from the car. Joyce was inserting a key into the front-door lock and turning it; then she ushered him ahead of her into the hallway where the first thing he saw was the coat-rack where Flora had always told him to hang his blazer or raincoat after school. He looked down and yes, Jesus, it was still there after all these years – the same goddam doormat, he was sure of it, worn to nothing except a few flat bristles. Wipe your feet, Eddie. That mat’s not there for decoration, you know. This house didn’t exist in the present tense.

Joyce called out: ‘Senga? Are you there?’

Music was playing very quietly from somewhere. The Eagles: ‘Lying Eyes’.