The Blade Artist

  Michael’s intense scrutiny of him never wavers.

  — My girls though, my sweet Californian girls, Franco says, almost wistfully, — I changed them without thinking about it. I always thought I wanted boys. ‘If it’s a lassie, it’s gaun back,’ I used to say. Now I’m different. I like girls, I don’t like laddies.

  — Good for you –

  — Fuck laddies, Franco cuts him off. — It’s youse I never wanted. No really.

  At last his son blinks. He takes a cigarette from a packet. A woman behind the counter looks like she is going to say something, but instead turns away.

  Franco feels his own mouth tighten in a satisfied smile. — I liked the idea ay having sons, but I was never really interested in you or Sean. Never loved youse like I do my girls. My beautiful, rich, spoiled daughters. You boys, he shakes his head, — tae me there was never any real point in you boys.

  Michael’s tight sneer of a mouth suddenly flaps open. The cigarette between his fingers is directed at Franco, — Is that aw you’ve got tae say tae me?

  — Naw, Franco says, rising to depart. — Whaire’s it your ma steys again?

  Michael smiles for the first time. Lights up the cigarette. Looks at his father. — Fuck knows.

  12

  THE EX

  Michael’s ostentatious non-cooperation is superfluous; the address he is heading to has stuck in Franco’s mind, as it’s next to the stair where a much-hated rival of his had once lived. Walking from the Foot of the Walk along Duke Street, to Easter Road and up Restalrig Road, he looks at a video clip that has come in, on his almost-dead US phone. Grace and Eve are sitting on the couch, waving to the camera, one with enthusiasm, the other coyly guarded. Melanie’s text: We miss you and we love you!

  Franco feels something stir inside him, but clicks off the phone and fights it down. It is Lochend, and in the drizzle the darkening streets surrounding him conjure up nothing but a steady flow of paggers and vendettas past. This is no place for him to be conflicted. He hunches into a bus shelter and pulls out the Tesco phone, trying to punch in Melanie’s cell number through the use of antiquated, multi-function keys. Rage rises in his chest, and he tries to breathe slowly, as with the activity of his big fingers and the jumping display on the liquid crystal, the shifting hieroglyphics slowly take shape as her number. Present with him in the bus shelter: a dead pigeon, a discarded kebab (which looks in better shape than the deceased bird) and two empty tins of Tennent’s Super Lager, one stacked neatly on top of the other. Euphoria rises in Franco as Melanie’s full number, with the US +1 dialling code is completed in its entirety.

  Then the phone dies. It just switches itself off.

  Franco presses the buttons feverishly. Nothing. It has perished. He looks at it in searing fury, thinks about crushing it under his heel. Instead he boots the cans down the pavement and stuffs the phone back into his pocket.

  Breathe. One, two, three.

  The rain has whipped up and beats on the back of the bus shelter, as Franco briefly succumbs to a phantom memory, warm and good, but never completely dancing out of his mind’s shadow to reveal itself fully. A girl’s hand touching his, her hair grazing his face, her scent in his nostrils. Did things like that happen to him, before Melanie? Surely yes. But he can’t allow it; can’t permit this place to be anything other than what he’s made it. Then the drumming eases off as the wind drops and the rain peters out, back into a thin drizzle.

  The stair is easily found. At one time he’d made fairly advanced plans to fire-bomb the house next door, which was occupied by Cha Morrison, his old nemesis. It astonishes him now to think that he cared enough about this guy to consider doing that. What great crime had Morrison committed against him, or he against Morrison? Nothing whatsoever sprang to mind. It had all been talk, which had then ramped up, becoming a bizarre sequence of threat and counter-threat. Otherwise there was zero basis for their rivalry. They had jointly manufactured this conflict to give their lives drama, imagining it into brutal reality.

  He goes into the neighbouring stair and realises that of the six flats, he can’t recall which one is occupied by June. He has no idea what name she will be using. There is no sign of ‘Chisholm’, her maiden name, or, to his relief, ‘Begbie’, which she’d taken to calling herself, and had registered Sean and Michael’s births under, although she and Franco had never married. No door suggests great wealth, so he opts for the one that gives the strongest impression of teeming squalor. It is painted black, some of which has spilled onto the frame, and it looks battered, with a Sellotaped, yellowing piece of paper, indicating that a J. McNAUGHTON resides there. He taps on the door and, sure enough, June answers.

  Even since he’d last briefly seen her at his mother’s funeral, surprisingly obese, June has massively expanded. It’s impossible to square this version with the thin, brittle one of his memory. She looks at him, and, for an excruciating second, seems as if she is going to hug him. Her lips quiver, and her eyes implore. But then she turns abruptly, and heads inside. Assailed by the smell of cats and old, congealed deep-fried fat and, most of all, stale tobacco, he follows her into the flat.

  Franco finds it hard to believe that he is facing her. She has sat opposite him in a faded floral-pattern armchair, part of a suite that is way too big for the cramped council flat. He can barely fathom how small the homes are. The room seems to conspicuously flaunt poverty.

  — The game’s no straight, aye, she says, obviously doped up on antidepressants. Her eyes seem dulled and set far back into a now-bulbous head, which was once little more than a skull.

  — Aye, he agrees, as a wary boy of around fourteen comes in. He fixes June with a sneer of defiant belligerence as he picks up a packet of cigarettes from the coffee table, then swiftly leaves.

  — Yours? Franco asks.

  — THEY ARE MA FAGS! she shouts after the departing boy, as she sparks up again.

  — No the fags, the laddie.

  — Aye, that’s Gerard. June takes a drag, her cheeks buckling in. — Ah’ve goat Andrea and Chloe tae. As well as oor Michael and Sean . . . Her eyes glaze over and a tissue, torn from a box on the coffee table, goes right to them. As she coughs raucously, Franco watches June shake: her fat wobbling inside shapeless, washed-out leisurewear garments. Her first pregnancy and Sean’s birth had seemed to wreck her body, but rather than bloat, June had shrunk into a Belsen skeleton, and he’d pretty much lost interest in her after that. He had muttered something like ‘fuck sake’ when she told him she was expecting Michael. There had been the jail, and their domestic life together, in which he recalled her swathed in blue light from the television set, through a fog of cigarette smoke. Although still a specialist in tobacco consumption, June is now obese and looks as grey-skinned as he’d done after his longest prison stretch. She inhales again, her chunky face caving in so radically it is as if her teeth have been extracted. — So you goat married again, ay?

  — Aye, official, he announces, looking coolly at her, waving his rings, — no just common law. We had tae, for my immigrant status. Wanted tae as well but, ay. If you feel the love, why no make the statement?

  June bristles a little. — Aye, they say it was that American lassie ye met in the jail.

  — She was the art therapist, aye. She expects me to say, Ah ken how it looks. Fuck that. — She’s young, good-looking, intelligent, from a wealthy family. We’ve got two lovely daughters. So what about you? Any romantic ties?

  June looks up at him and coughs, managing to shake her head before being beset with an eye-watering fit.

  — That snout’ll kill ye, he observes.

  June sucks in some air and wheezes, — Ye pack them in, likes?

  — Aye. Stopped the peeve n aw. Got bored wi it aw, ay.

  — What aboot aw the other stuff? The fightin?

  — Aye, got fed up with the jail. This art thing’s a good living, and I enjoy it.

  June shifts her head, and it seems to sink into her body. Franco can’t discern a nec
k. — You were eywis good at art. Back at the school.

  — Right, Franco laughs.

  — Angie Knight, when she heard ye were back, she goes tae me, and June’s expression takes on a coquettishness he finds grotesque, — ‘Tell ye what, June, ah widnae be surprised if you n Franco ended up back the gither.’

  — Ah wid, Franco says brutally, thinking: She’s a fucking simpleton. Why didn’t I see it before? Probably because I was too.

  June’s face suddenly and dramatically flushes red. It is such a violently abrupt transformation that for a second Franco believes that she’s having a seizure. Then she starts to cry. — Oor son, Frank, oor Sean, what are you daein aboot it? Somebody killed our laddie and you’re daein nowt aboot it!

  — See ye, he says, getting up to leave. It was a familiar pattern. They would whisperingly condemn his violence with those sour, baleful expressions, until they wanted some cunt sorting out, then he would suddenly become the big hero. Manipulation. He’d discussed all this with Melanie, with his mentor, John Dick, the prison officer. It had suited them all to keep him as he was. It still suits them. He will leave them back here in Edinburgh. They can either shut the door in his face or seize him in a hypocritical embrace, it won’t matter; he will be walking away from them all.

  — Find whae did it and hurt them, Frank, yir good at that, she shouts after him.

  This stops him in his tracks. He turns to contemplate her. — I mind I battered you bad a couple ay times. Once when you were expecting him, Frank says. — That was just wrong.

  — Christ, it’s a bit late tae apologise now!

  — Who’s apologising? It was wrong, he accepts, — but I’m not sorry I hurt you. I’m just indifferent. Always was. I had no emotional connection to you whatsoever. So how can I be sorry?

  — Ah’m the mother ay oor . . . you . . . June stammers, then explodes, — you’ve nae emotional connection tae anybody!

  — Anger is an emotion, Franco says, opening the door and exiting.

  He goes downstairs and out into the street, heading to the bus stop. Thinks of the nights in bed with June. She’d had a flush of desirable youth, her body had been lithe and firm, as arousing as the insolent whip of her fringe, and there was that slutty chewing of her gum that excited and irritated him in equal measures. Yet he can’t ever remember caressing her. Only fucking her hard.

  In his pocket, two phones, the Tesco one, so cold and rough and dead. He pushes it aside and gently squeezes the sleek American iPhone. He thinks of Melanie, spooning with her in the night, the fragrance of her, as her blonde hair tickles his nostrils. The sickle-shaped birthmark on her wrist. The love flowing through the skin on their bodies like blood. How she was his tender underbelly. How if they wanted to plunge him with a knife they would go straight through her into him. Into that part rendered soft by loving.

  13

  THE DANCE PARTNER 2

  I got to see the blonde American lassie they had all been talking about. The news of her had spread through the prison system like a virus. People flocked to take her art classes; looking for a smile, a whiff of perfume. All about the accumulation of wanking material. The violent sexuality of imaginative space, where you went when you were on lock-up in that box. The last freedom.

  I just thought, why? Why was she doing this? She came from money. Why work with the scum of the earth? But she surprised me. As well as being a good person, she was strong and righteous. There was nothing wishy-washy about her. Yes, she’d had all the advantages, but she’d chosen to try and make a difference in the lives of some of the most broken, lost men.

  I recall in that first class she wore a tight green sweater and black leggings, with a green band in her hair. Afterwards, I thought I’d be pulling the fuckin end off it all night thinking about her. But I didn’t wank for a second. I just lay there, remembering her words, her voice, constructing romantic fantasies about her. They made me feel pathetic and weak. But I imagined talking to her, alone. Without the giggles and comments of all the arseholes in the group. How could I talk to her? I didn’t try. I worked.

  There was the portrait I started, Dance Partner, of Craig Liddel. Seeker. He was the guy I’d got the big sentence for killing, my second manslaughter conviction, reduced from murder, as the court (correctly) deemed it was self-defence. It was our third confrontation, the first being in jail, when he came off best, the second at an old mill house in Northumberland, where I had the advantage. The decider bout in the car park was conclusive. In the picture Liddel’s face, not set in a sneer, or crumpled with cold contempt or murderous rage, as it was when we met, but open and smiling. Around it, a series of ghosts of men, women and children. Then, Melanie Francis, approaching me, intrigued. Asking me about my work. The way she called it that; not my painting, but my work.

  I told her it was the man I’d killed. The people whose lives around him I had changed. His family and friends. There were others; the women he’d never know, the children he’d never have, and the places, the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, he’d never see.

  — Do you aspire to see those places? she asked me.

  I looked into her deep blue eyes and realised for the first time, to my shock and horror, that I did. — Yes, I told her.

  I was falling for her from day one. It seemed ludicrous. I was daring to dream, to fantasise a future for us together when I’d barely spoken a word to her. I thought of us being together in America, in a big convertible, driving to Big Sur and the Joshua Tree. I could find no weakness in her warm, missionary light, couldn’t even determine its source; political, religious, philosophical, or just rebelliousness against her own privileged class? I didn’t care. I read as much as I could, fighting through my dyslexia, now I had motivation, till my brain hurt. I was listening to audiobooks, and finally learning to decode all that jumbled nonsense. She was a powerful catalyst, yes, but this change wasn’t just about her.

  I grew bored with the staple True Crime books I had used to develop my reading skills; most were shabby affairs of self-serving bullshit, ghostwritten by grubby journos to impress kids, and wankers whose balls would never drop. I read more challenging stuff. Philosophy and art history. The biographies of the great painters. To learn, yes, but also to impress her.

  But who was she? She was good and strong and I was bad and weak. That’s what hit me most of all from being around her. That I was weak. The notion was ridiculous; it went against everything I’d come to believe about my persona and image, against the way I’d consciously forged myself over the years. Yet who else but a weak man would spend half his life letting others lock him up like an animal?

  I was one of the weakest people on the planet. I had zero control over my darker impulses. Therefore I was constant jail fodder. Some mouthy cunt got wide; they had to be decimated on the spot, and I was back in prison. Thus such nonentities were in total command of my destiny. That was my first major epiphany: I was weak because I wasn’t in control of myself. Melanie was in control of herself. In order to be with somebody like her, to live a free life, not in a tenement or scheme on the breadline, or even a suburb and crippled with a lifetime of debt, I needed a free mind. I had to get control of myself.

  I told her this.

  14

  THE MENTOR

  Franco had returned to Elspeth’s quite early the previous evening, and called Melanie on the American phone. The battery finally died in mid-conversation. This frustrated him, as he sensed that she was ramping herself up to say something important. The Tesco device seemed to belong to an era from about three prison sentences back. It sat in the palm of his hand like the last of an endangered species. He plugged in the charger and pumped electricity into this corpse, seeing if it might reanimate. He’d put ten pounds on the account, at the sales clerk’s advice. — Twenty’s too much, she’d told him earnestly. He’d shaken his head in disbelief. Now he saw what she was on about, the thing seemed designed to fall apart as soon as he exited the supermarket. Now he had to remember to get an adapto
r for the US charger. Then, suddenly, the jet lag he thought he’d mastered hit him like a sledgehammer, and he retired early, sleeping deeply and restoratively.

  Rising into a dull morning, Franco makes his usual breakfast, with provisions he’d picked up in Waitrose, substituting feta for Swiss cheese, and this time is able to tempt his sister into joining them. As they sit around the kitchen table, with the exception of Greg, who has gone to work early, Elspeth asks, — So how is June?

  — Same. But fatter, he adds.

  George and Thomas smirk, then stop under Elspeth’s reprimanding stare.

  — Did she tell you about the funeral arrangements?

  — Aye, but there’s nothing much, other than what we already know: it’s on Friday, two o’clock at Warriston, and I’m footing the bill.

  — Well, it is your son, Elspeth glared, — and you can afford it and she can’t.

  — I didn’t say I was complaining.

  Elspeth looks doubtfully at him, but sees the boys taking an interest, so pulls back. — Greg says he’s taking the afternoon off.

  — I told him that there’s no need.

  — We’re still family, she states, her gaze challenging him. But there is no response; his eyes are on his plate.

  — Wonder what happens when you die, George says.