The Bad Fire Read online

  She said, ‘You have to go.’

  He heard her, but her words might have been filtered through muslin. He said, ‘He was always talking about coming over here. Always wanted to see his grandson. When we spoke on the phone last New Year’s Day he told me this was the year he’d finally make the trip. I don’t know if he meant it. You might as well take a goldfish out of a bowl as the old man out of Glasgow.’

  He thought of his son, Mark, fifteen years old, asleep in the bedroom down the hall. Mark had never seen Jackie Mallon. And now he never would.

  Claire said, ‘You could get a flight today. Joyce is going to need support.’

  He hadn’t seen his sister in five years, the time of her last American trip, when her marriage to the irredeemable Harry Haskell – a permanently unemployed freeloader – had just ended. She’d dressed in black clothes during her stay, jeans, T-shirts, sneakers, impenetrable sunglasses. She projected an attitude of mystery and cool. She looked as if she were wandering, in a distracted fashion, some Left Bank of her imagination.

  But he couldn’t bring to mind her features clearly, and this bothered him. He knew what it was: the world was out of focus all of a sudden, and his memory with it. ‘There’s a bit I haven’t told you.’

  ‘I’m listening,’ Claire said.

  He heard a pulse in his skull. It was like the sound of a cork in water slapping time after time against the struts of a pier. ‘I haven’t told you how he died.’

  3

  At ten a.m. Charles McWhinnie drove his Rover south across Kingston Bridge. The heat haze had already burned out of the sky above Glasgow. It was going to be one of those days when light rose shimmeringly from pavements and tar surfaces melted. The headlines in the Evening Times would invariably read, TEMPERATURES SOAR, CITY SWELTERS.

  McWhinnie, born and brought up north of the river, didn’t like the Southside. The city seemed alien over there. Even the neighbourhood names struck him as strange. Crossmyloof. Strathbungo. Ibrox – which he thought sounded like a veterinary ointment for chafed cow udders. A jar of Eyebrox lotion, please.

  He glanced at the narrow motionless river as he crossed the bridge. He saw the tall cranes that serviced the Govan Yard, and the George V Docks, but where these huge constructions had once crowded the skyline, they were few now – skeletal souvenirs of the shipbuilding that years before had been the city’s most vibrant industry.

  It had been a time, McWhinnie thought, when people took a pride in their work. What did you have nowadays? Social Security and welfare fraud and chancrous housing estates where kids bought and sold drugs with brazen abandon and fried their brains on lethal concoctions; any stray traveller in such places might have thought himself in a suburb of Beirut.

  Collar undone, tie loose, he parked his car in a narrow street of black tenements a quarter of a mile from the drabness of Govan Cross Shopping Centre. Govan had always been a shipyard burgh, a company town, vibrant and cocky. Now shops were barricaded behind steel shutters, and graffiti had been spray-painted everywhere, most of it cryptic save for the occasional sectarian slogan. IRA Rules. Bigotry had never truly died here, no matter what claims to the contrary certain civic leaders and flash media guys might make. It was still simmering in segregated schools and uneasy mixed marriages. Prods and Tims. McWhinnie despised this divide, this moronic anachronism in a city alleged to be surging into a glossy European future.

  He took a big paper bag from his Rover, then locked the car. He entered one of the tenements, passing a group of very young kids who were smoking cigarettes. The kids glared at him with tribal hostility as he made his way into the building and walked the length of the close, which was dark and clammy, to the stairs.

  He climbed. On the first landing he unlocked a door whose nameplate read: A Factor. He slipped inside quickly, nudging the door shut behind him.

  ‘I want in and out of here as fast as humanly possible,’ he said.

  The little man who sat in the room and gazed at the TV said, ‘Aye, I don’t blame you. This place … I wasn’t expecting the fucking Ritz, granted, but this is a bloody slum.’

  ‘We’ll deal with your accommodation at the appropriate time,’ McWhinnie said. He tried very hard to be non-specific in his utterances. When you were precise, you often found yourself compromised.

  He looked round the one-room flat; claustrophobic, faded daffodil paint, a window so grubby it was opaque, a rag of a curtain, a cracked porcelain sink. A single bed faced the window. On paper, the premises belonged to a certain Arthur Factor, who was non-existent.

  McWhinnie put the bag on the table and watched the little man open it hurriedly. It contained a loaf of white bread, a packet of bacon, six small eggs, three apples, three oranges, a carton of milk, a box of tea bags, a paperback sci-fi saga entitled Planet of Ice, Tagamet capsules and a bottle of cheap blended whisky.

  The little man looked at the label on the bottle with slight disgust, then surveyed the items on the table. ‘How long am I staying here?’

  ‘I can’t say.’

  ‘A rough idea.’

  ‘A week,’ McWhinnie said vaguely. He didn’t have a clue.

  ‘A week? Christ’s sake. The telly’s shite. You can’t expect me to sit here and go blind looking at a picture as bad as that,’ and the little man pointed at the TV, where a fat woman with big hair, blurred by snowy interference, wept in front of Jerry Springer. The caption on the screen read: MaryLou Says Her Husband Made Love To Her Mother.

  Bones picked up the paperback. ‘A science-fiction book. Beam me the fuck up, Scotty.’ He looked at McWhinnie. ‘This isn’t my kind of thing, squire. I like anything by Dick Francis.’

  ‘Your literary taste is noted. I’ll send round a horsy selection,’ McWhinnie said. ‘And I’ll find somebody to adjust the bloody TV. Do you have any more complaints? Or are we finished now?’

  ‘You didn’t bring a newspaper. I like the Record. I told you that. In a pinch, I’ll read the Sun.’

  ‘Tabloids tend to slip my mind. I’ll arrange it.’

  ‘White bread. I’m supposed to live on this?’

  ‘Think of it as a starter kit. The duck à l’orange with potatoes au gratin and baby carrots comes later.’

  ‘You’re a card, son. People would pay to hear you. See, I’ve always watched my diet. I’ve sat hours in sweatboxes to lose a few pounds. And white bread is just not fucking on. As for bacon … fat clogs arteries fastern twenty rats stuck in a drainpipe.’

  McWhinnie ran a hand over his straw-coloured hair. He had the look of a sprinter only a year or so past his prime. Women warmed to him instantly, but somehow prolonged relationships failed to happen. He was never sure why. Maybe women thought he was too committed to the job, too anxious to be accepted into the bloodstream of the Force.

  ‘Right, finished here,’ he said. ‘I’m offsky.’

  ‘Just a minute, son. What school did you go to?’

  ‘Beg pardon?’

  ‘A toff’s school, was it? A fee-paying school, eh? Your accent is posh Glasgow. Not like mine. ’Course, I only went to the local eedjit school with all the other toerags. I wasn’t privileged, you understand. No silver spoon in my gub.’

  ‘Get this straight. My name, my background – off limits to you. Think of them as protected by live high-voltage wires. Go near them, they barbecue you like a sausage on a hot grill. Is that clear?’

  ‘You’re a tough guy, eh? I’ll tell you something, sahib. You don’t have the stuff for this work. I can hear it in your voice.’

  ‘I’ll be sure to keep your opinion in mind,’ McWhinnie said. ‘One last thing. Don’t even think about leaving here and wandering around. You understand me? It’s in your own interests to stay indoors.’

  The little man said, ‘Your wish is my command,’ and opened the bottle of scotch. ‘You’ll have one for the road?’

  ‘On a cold day in hell,’ said McWhinnie. It was insufferably hot in this room, and the trapped air irritated him, and he didn’t like th
is little fart he had to deal with. In fact, this kind of thing wasn’t in his job description. Nowhere. Buying bloody groceries for scum. How did he get into this? What did this have to do with law and order? He hadn’t signed on as an errand boy.

  Somewhat dejected, he stepped towards the door. You don’t have the stuff for this work. The little man’s observation rolled through his head.

  ‘A wee minute, squire. Did you take care of that, ah, business matter?’

  McWhinnie removed a plain brown envelope from his pocket and tossed it to the little man, who caught it.

  ‘Twenty-six hundred all squared away,’ McWhinnie said.

  The little man looked inside the envelope. It was filled with slips of paper. Each was marked Paid In Full. Twenty-six hundred and ninety-seven quid of debts to bookies all taken care of in one swoop.

  McWhinnie said, ‘I’ll leave you to your purgatory.’

  ‘You might have put in a bloody phone,’ the little man said.

  ‘You don’t get phones in purgatory, Bones. It’s a place of solitude where you contemplate your sins.’

  McWhinnie shut the door and went down the stairs two at a time, relieved to be making his exit. Outside, the smoking kids had gone, the front doors of the Rover lay open and where the expensive tape deck had been there was only a black slot, like an unsmiling mouth.

  Those little fuckers, he thought.

  Those bloody monsters. He clenched his fists and looked up. The bright sky over Govan turned angry black-red in his vision.

  From the window of his dreich one-room cell, the little man looked down at the sight of the well-spoken prat in the bright white shirt striding in a spluttering rage around his shiny car, kicking at useless tyres, fuming.

  Funny stuff. Ho ha.

  He opened the scotch, poured a measure into a cup and sniffed it. Granted, nobody was obliged to provide him with liquor. But if they were going to, why did they have to donate sewage?

  Bones took whisky into his mouth and swirled it for a time. Purgatory, he thought. So this is what good Catholics fear.

  The waiting room. Where you find out if you’re getting a ticket for the onward journey.

  I know where I’m going, he thought.

  He stared at the gloomy walls. The faded yellow. The crap TV. The single bed with what looked like an Army-issue blanket, rough as a bear’s arse. It wouldn’t take long before this place spooked the daylights out of him, and then the sheer force of the terrible thing he’d done would kick him, like the hoof of an angry horse, straight in the soft core of his heart.

  4

  Eddie Mallon arrived at his mother’s house in Stony Brook on Long Island at dawn; a red sky, a frail arrangement of still clouds tinted by thin sunlight. He parked his Cherokee, then walked up on to the porch. He could hear the 24-hour radio station his mother favoured, big-band stuff of the 1940s, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw. ‘Stars Fell on Alabama.’

  He opened the front door and called out, ‘Hello?’ and Flora appeared in the kitchen doorway. She rose every morning of her life at daybreak and set about pruning, clipping, planting. Her garden was no mild hobby. It was serious business, an escape to a fragrant world of petal, stamen, pollination.

  She was a small white-haired woman with pale red cheeks and rounded features. She looked, Eddie sometimes thought, like the Universal Grandmother. She stood on tiptoe to kiss her son.

  ‘Surprise surprise, a dawn visitor,’ she said. ‘Tea?’

  Eddie shook his head. ‘I’d prefer coffee.’ Then he remembered she’d quit drinking caffeine. He wondered how to approach the matter of his father. Direct. Say what you have to, then deal with the consequences.

  ‘I can do you a herbal tea,’ she said.

  ‘How about plain old water, Ma?’ He followed her inside the kitchen.

  ‘Just passing, did you say? You’re so transparent, Eddie. I’ve been expecting you.’ She flipped the switch of an electric kettle.

  ‘You heard …?’ He wondered if Joyce had called after all.

  ‘Rennie phoned from Glasgow to tell me.’

  ‘Rennie?’

  ‘A cousin of mine. She was married to Nick.’

  Who the hell were Rennie and Nick? There were so many relatives in the old country, uncles, aunts, cousins, second cousins, people Eddie Mallon knew nothing about, strangers’ faces in hefty photo-albums Flora dragged out whenever she’d had more than two glasses of vodka. This is Sammy, my sister Sally’s husband in Pollokshaws. Here’s Willie and Anne at their silver wedding at the Grosvenor.

  ‘How are you taking it? How are you feeling?’ he asked.

  Flora said, ‘It was like I’d been struck on the head … I’m not sure I believe he’s dead yet.’

  Eddie drank his water, then set his empty glass in the sink. The kettle boiled, switched itself off. Flora dumped a tea bag into a mug decorated with a toadstool. The tea smelled of raspberry.

  Flora said, ‘I turned the radio on a minute ago and the band was playing “Moonlight in Vermont”, and I thought of your father, and I remembered we danced together at the Barrowlands Ballroom in Glasgow and that was one of the tunes they played. He loved to dance. He was so nimble.’ She looked at Eddie. ‘Did he ever tell you he wanted to be a soccer player?’

  ‘No. I knew he enjoyed the game. He took me to a couple of matches, I remember.’

  ‘When he was eighteen he had a trial for a team called Third Lanark. The coach wasn’t impressed. Jackie was so disappointed. He wanted to be a football hero, get his face on a cigarette card, newspaper clippings. “Mallon scores winning goal in the last minute.” His whole life might have gone in another direction if he’d played well that day.’

  Eddie touched the back of his mother’s hand and thought: she seems to be taking it well. But why shouldn’t she? She hadn’t seen Jackie Mallon for thirty years, and so far as Eddie knew hadn’t spoken to him in all that time. She’d loved him enough to marry him, but after so long a separation even the strongest of loves would surely deteriorate into a series of small regrets and smudged memories.

  Eddie said, ‘So he never became a football hero.’

  ‘He didn’t become any kind of hero.’

  ‘We can’t all be hotshots. Most of us make compromises with our ambitions, Ma. Dad made them. He quit dreaming and went into business.’

  Flora looked at her son. ‘Business? Is that what you call it? Fireplaces and doors ripped out of old houses, fancy ironwork, lead guttering. He had that warehouse in Bluevale Street crammed with mountains of absolute junk piled up with no sense or order.’

  Eddie Mallon remembered the warehouse, and how it smelled of rust and damp and paraffin. It was a wonderland of the used and discarded, busted statues and skewed sundials and rusted iron radiators, ancient Singer sewing machines and old Underwood typewriters and valve radios from the 1930s and ’40s. Jackie always had a nightwatchman around in case of thieves, and warehousemen in grey coats who had pencils stuck behind their ears and smoked Woodbines all day long. At night guard dogs were left behind to roam the premises, fierce beasts with fangs.

  Flora said, ‘I always thought he could have done much better than become a glorified junk man.’

  ‘Ma –’ But Eddie wasn’t sure how he wanted to continue. He was no junk collector, Ma. Let’s give him some dignity: call him what he called himself, an architectural salvage dealer. When an old house was about to be demolished, he was there, studying, picking, assessing.

  Flora smiled a little sadly. She spoke as if to herself. ‘He was a beautiful man to look at. And charm? In abundance. He could talk the moon out of a cloudy sky. Sometimes we’d be walking along Alexandra Parade and all the girls would turn their heads when we strolled past, and I was the one on his arm. I was so proud. Other women wanted him and they’d do anything underhand to get him. And your father was easily led, Eddie. He had the ego of a film star. He couldn’t pass a shop window without glancing at himself.’ Couldnae pass … She’d shed most of her native accent; but whe
n she spoke of the past she sometimes slipped into Glasgow dialect. ‘And then I think of that time in Largs and how sweet life was in the beginning.’

  Whenever Flora spoke of Jackie Mallon, the coastal town of Largs invariably arose and her expression became glazed: she had a golden memory of Largs where she’d honeymooned with Jackie. Eddie wondered why she’d never found a new husband, or even a lover. She’d buried herself in teaching grade school and then when she retired she’d hit the horticultural books vigorously. And suddenly this little house in Stony Brook overflowed with plants; a greenhouse out back was crammed with growing things. Flora worked at her gardening with the zeal of a Victorian botanist.

  She said, ‘I confronted him a couple of times about his … amorous misadventures. He always looked so ashamed. It would never happen again, he’d say. But it did. Then after you were born my priorities shifted – I just wanted to keep a nice house and raise my family. Jackie could have had a harem for all I cared. I wanted respectability.’

  She blew her nose into a tissue she plucked from a box on the table. ‘Salvage,’ she said, as if the failure of the marriage could be crystallized in this one word she obviously found so distasteful that it seemed to stick, like some bitter tablet, at the back of her throat.

  Eddie moved close to her, placing a hand on her shoulder. ‘Joyce wants me to attend the funeral.’

  ‘Jackie was your father, Eddie. If you want to see him buried, that’s perfectly natural.’

  Eddie Mallon was a little uncomfortable. He wondered if he was being disloyal to his mother. No, I’m not betraying her, I’m going to help bury my father, it’s what a son does, even if his parents have been estranged for years, even if he’s lived with his mother in the United States and he hasn’t seen his father since 1969 in Glasgow. Taking sides doesn’t come into it.

  Death negates the need for diplomacy.

  He wondered if Flora knew about the letters and birthday cards that had started to arrive from Jackie seven or eight years ago or the phone calls Jackie made a couple of times a year, or the fact Eddie had phoned his father from Queens. Eddie could still remember how that first letter had begun: Dear Eddie, It would be unnatural if you didn’t think bad of me. Christmas packages had begun to arrive later, gifts of Scottish origin, tartan scarves, fruit-cake, McCowan’s toffee and Edinburgh rock for Mark.