31

Larry McQueen woke, got out of bed and went in search of the TV deliveryman and wondered, as he padded in pyjamas and slippers from room to room, if he’d dreamed the fellow up, and all this TV delivery stuff was just a nonsense. But his nose ached and there was dry blood on his hands and he remembered the fellow punching him. He wondered how long he’d slept.

‘Hallo? You there? Coooeeee.’

No answer. He looked in the kitchen. Checked out the bathroom in case the fellow was answering the call of nature. In the living room, where a bowl of wax fruit sat on a long coffee table, Larry looked from the window down into the street, which was clogged with parked cars.

He walked into the hall and stepped into his son’s bedroom and gazed at the prints on the walls. Modern art. All lines and paint spillage, any moron could do that, what the hell did Billy pay for these bits of crap? Billy had more money than sense. And precious little sense anyway.

Back into the hall.

‘Hello? TV man, where are you?’

The flat was silent.

Larry opened the front door and went out to the landing and stood looking down the flight of stairs that led to the street. Maybe the telly man was having trouble getting the box out of his van. Could be. Needs a hand. Larry descended a little shakily. He clutched the banister rail. At the bottom of the stairs he stopped and peered at the front door, a rectangle of dimming light. He stood motionless for a time.

Who was he fooling? He couldn’t help the fellah lift the TV box if it was heavy. He wasn’t young any more. He didn’t have –

Then blank. He couldn’t remember why he’d left the flat.

Bloody hell.

You get old. The brain. You don’t. Things slip. Tilt. You used to play bingo every Wednesday night. You remember when the lamps in the street were lit by gas flame and coal was delivered in a horse-drawn cart and you needed a ration book for sugar and that time the Queen visited Glasgow after her Coronation and the population lined the streets and waved their little flags, that was when people had respect for royalty –

He was outside now and the royal-blue sky was very very high and he felt a wee bit dizzy between the tall red tenements and sun glancing off windows and he thought, if I sit down on a wall I’ll be fine, and his heart was awful fast and when he reached for a wall he found it wasn’t solid, it was shrubbery, and it parted under the weight of his hand and he fell through it and landed arse over elbow in somebody’s garden where there was crusty dogshite and some old fast-food boxes containing onion rings from a prehistoric age and a burger covered with blue fuzz oh Christ and I can’t get up.

‘Billy,’ he said quietly. ‘Come and help me. Help your dad.’

His mouth was dry as cinders. He felt weak.

I am lying here because because …

He rolled on to his back and looked up. The sky had an inky quality. His left foot had become twisted in a tangle of shrubbery and the slipper was gone.

O Billy, help me.

Or that nurse Thelma, where was she, where was she?

Then somebody was speaking to him. ‘Let me give you a hand up, mister.’

Larry had big spots in front of his eyes, like raindrops. The face that loomed down was young and friendly. Sideburns and short hair a funny orange colour and an unlit cigarette end between the lips.

‘Come on, let me get you up. I’ll just grab you under the shoulders and you hang on to me, right?’

‘Aye, right,’ Larry said.

‘I saw you come out of the close,’ the young man said. ‘I’ll take you back inside.’

‘Aye,’ Larry said. ‘I need my bed.’

‘Where did you think you were going dressed only in your pyjamas, for God’s sake?’

‘I was …’ Larry’s head emptied like a cistern flushed.

‘Never mind. Just hang on.’

Larry leaned against the young man. They went inside the tenement, then up the stairs. Ascending, Larry had a sense of having discarded his body.

Inside the flat the young man said, ‘You live here on your own?’

‘My son sometimes,’ Larry said.

‘Where is your son?’

Larry sat on the sofa and shook his head.

‘You don’t know where he is, eh?’

Larry said, ‘He moves here and there. I need my nurse. That’s who I need.’

‘I’ll give her a bell. What’s her number?’

‘In the kitchen by the phone, Thelma’s her name.’

‘Leave it to me,’ the young man said.

Larry said, ‘What’s your name, sonny?’

‘Giovanni. Gio.’

‘That’s a foreign name.’

‘I was born right here in Glasgow. Nitshill to be exact.’

‘I’m McQueen,’ Larry said.

‘Aye, I know, I saw the nameplate on the door.’

Larry listened to the young man go inside the kitchen, then the low rumble of his voice. Giovanni returned. ‘Stale in here,’ he said, and blew his nose into a big handkerchief. ‘Your nurse is on her way.’

‘You’re a right Samaritan, lad,’ Larry said.

‘She also said she’d contact your son.’ The young man looked round the room. ‘I’ll be off then.’

‘Can you not stay?’

The living room was already empty. Open-mouthed, Larry wondered about dreams and that fuzzy borderline where what was real and what was not just melted into one incomprehensible experience. He wiped drool from the corner of his mouth.