Not the End of the World Page 7

  The four musicians walked on and the quiet changed to stern, energetic applause. Two women, two men, foreign, all funereal, their thoughts in some other, internal universe (perhaps she should have applied to music college, after all). One woman beautiful, one so-so, both men uglyish. No beards. They settled onto their uncomfortable-looking chairs, they adjusted their instruments, they raised their bows—another moment of stillness, absolute this time so that nothing of those first hushed notes of the adagio would be lost, the cello pulsating on the air, the dissonances building from the violins and the viola—crescendo, drop a step, cello repeating, building, rising, melancholic—Rebecca felt as if she might be about to have a vision, her whole body had lifted a few inches into the air. Only when the sweetness of the allegro took over, drenching everyone and everything in sunshine, could she relax, safe in the knowledge that she wasn’t going to float away. The world could not end as long as the “Dissonant” Quartet was being played.

  “Dislocated jaw, broken nose, fractured left cheekbone, hairline fracture to the skull, front teeth gone, bit of your tongue gone—nasty one, that—try to put your hands out to save yourself next time, better still wear the right gear. We’ll have to keep you in, obviously, keep an eye on the skull fracture, you don’t feel sick at all? Seeing double? Good. Any questions?”

  “More morphine?” Except what came out of his mouth didn’t sound like language.

  “Ha, ha. I’ll leave you with Mum now.” The blur of white coat disappeared. Don’t try to talk, darling. Cool hand stroking his forehead, hot tears rolling down the sides of his face, pooling in his ears. Everything’s all right. Don’t talk. He held his mother’s hand. Hush.

  And then the allegro molto. And it was all about closing now and trying to make the most of it because it would finish and really you just wanted it to go on forever—the bearded man from the café was staring goggle-eyed at her. She closed her eyes. Idiot. But… she opened her eyes. He was clutching his chest, rigid with terror. He looked as if he might be about to fall headlong over the rail but he staggered into the person next to him, who glared silently in that middle-class way. Rebecca moved fast, round the back of the gallery. By the time she reached him someone had helped him out, but he had only got as far as the top of the stairs outside the exit, where he sat now like a man who wasn’t accustomed to sitting on stairs. He looked peculiarly unloved. And then he slumped, to a little gasp from the people trying to minister to him. An usher said she’d phoned for an ambulance, someone felt ineffectually for a pulse. The man was the color of newly poured concrete. Someone was obviously going to have to do something.

  “Undo his collar and tie, loosen his belt,” Rebecca said. People looked at her warily. “It’s OK, I’m a trained first-aider,” she snapped. Which was true. She felt with two fingers for the pulse in his neck. Nothing. She checked his chest for breath signs. Nothing. She tilted his head back and exhaled into his mouth. She could taste coffee and sugar, she could taste the apricot pastry. Gross. She compressed his chest, one-two-three-four-five, one breath, one-two-three-four-five compressions, one breath. She squeezed his heart and gave him her breath and kept on doing so because he wasn’t coming back to life like he was supposed to.

  The coda opened—the man was dying to the accompaniment of Mozart—sublime cadence fell on sublime cadence. If she had to die, Rebecca hoped it would be to Mozart. The final cadence, the quick clean ending, and then the applause flooding the out-of-sight auditorium. You wouldn’t want to die to the sound of applause. A paramedic ran up the stairs towards her. “Heart attack,” she said, matter-of-factly, between breaths, between compressions. He spoke television dialogue to her—“I’ll take over from here”—and she stood up, suddenly dizzy.

  More television dialogue—“I’ve got a pulse,” the paramedic said, glancing up at Rebecca. “Well done.” People murmured praise, someone asked her if she was OK, but she was already gone, stumbling down the stairs, her own healthy heart thudding, out of the door into fine rain and a weak, watery sun and the traffic jammed on Clerk Street. She could hardly breathe, as if the bearded man had taken all of her breath and left her none. She thought she was giving him the gift of life but now it felt as if it was the other way round. And anyway she wasn’t sure she wanted the gift of life. Or the gift of death. She didn’t want that kind of power, she didn’t want to be like a god. What the fuck would she do with that kind of responsibility? She walked quickly, the tears rolling down her face, unchecked.

  V

  SHEER BIG

  WASTE OF LOVE

  Nunc scio quid sit amor

  VIRGIL

  ADDISON FOX WAS named for his father. Bill Addison refused to have anything to do with his unlooked-for son, but Addison’s mother, Shirley, was determined to get Addison’s father’s name on his birth certificate, one way or another. Addison met his father only once, when he was seven years old—an encounter so traumatic (Addison, his mother, and a relatively innocent bystander ended up in the casualty department of the local hospital) that Addison lost any further desire to be acquainted with his reluctant father.

  Paternity, in general, wasn’t a subject that Addison had ever given much thought to until he found that he was going to be a father himself. When he celebrated his fortieth birthday, Addison had neither child nor wife. When he celebrated his forty-first, he had both, one inside the other. Every morning when Addison woke up, he was surprised anew by these two facts.

  Addison had been courted, bedded, and wedded in haste by a primary-school teacher called Clare Soutar. Addison met her when he gave her a speeding ticket on the M8. Addison never did understand how she had got his phone number out of him (it was against so many rules it didn’t bear thinking about) but he seemed to remember that it was some ruse about coming to her school to give a talk to the children about what it was like to be a traffic policeman.

  Clare, Addison very soon discovered, ran her entire life at breakneck speed. By the time they were sprinting up the aisle, he had begun to wonder if she didn’t have some kind of metabolic disease. “Well, neither of us is getting any younger, Addison,” she said, when she proposed to him after two months of hectic dating.

  Addison spent several evenings of their early courtship helping with lesson preparation. At the time, Clare had been doing a project on the Ancient Greeks with her Primary Sevens—cutting and pasting pictorial maps of a Greek city-state, constructing a Trojan horse out of ice-lolly sticks, making chitons out of sheets and temples out of the cardboard tubes from kitchen rolls, and mounting dramatic little playlets about the adventures of the gods. Addison learned a lot from this project—geometry, epic poetry, metempsychosis, to name but three things—and wondered how he had lived all his life in Edinburgh without knowing anything about Greek columns. “Doric, Ionic, Corinthian,” he explained to his partner, Robbie, one afternoon as they crawled up the Mound, escorting a car containing some minor royal. “Take the National Gallery for example, the volutes on that are—” until Robbie told him that he really didn’t give a shite what the vol-au-vents on the National Gallery were. Addison reckoned that if he stuck with Clare he might make up for the education he had mysteriously bypassed at an earlier age. If he was lucky, he thought, he might make up for some of the mothering he lacked as well.

  Clare herself was from a family that was top-heavy with competent maternal women. Her mother was a district nurse, one sister, Fiona, was an assistant bank manager, another, Kirsty, a social worker. Clare’s father was a meek, bemused man who submitted willingly to female authority. “Best just to give in to them,” he confided to Addison over his first family dinner, “makes for a much easier life.”

  “Clare’s always liked a man in uniform,” her mother said to Addison.

  “Oh yeah.” Fiona laughed casually. “She’s had a fireman, that guy that was in the navy, even that history lecturer was in the Territorial Army, wasn’t he?”

  “A sergeant in the traffic division’s a good one, though,” Kirsty said, as
if Addison was part of a set to be collected. Addison stared at his plate of pork casserole and mashed potatoes and felt slightly sick.

  “He’s sitting right in front of you,” Clare rebuked mildly and she caught Addison’s eye and winked at him. It struck him that he knew absolutely nothing about family life. He supposed this was something else he was going to have to learn.

  It was only when Clare was drawing up the seating plan for the church that Addison’s truly remarkable absence of relatives became apparent to her. They had been so busy getting to know each other in the details (a shared hatred of mushrooms, a love of fairground rides and so on) that the bigger things (Addison’s orphan status, Clare’s diabetes) had got slightly overlooked.

  “No one at all?” She frowned. Addison shook his head.

  “Not even a second cousin three times removed?”

  No one, he assured her. Which was a lie, but it was so much easier than the truth. Addison simplified his life story for Clare—he had been illegitimate (a fact borne out by his birth certificate), his mother died the week before his eighth birthday, when no one came forward to claim him he had been sent to a vicious Catholic orphanage where he had stayed until his sixteenth birthday. At the age of twenty he decided he had a choice between following a life of crime or becoming a policeman, and had chosen the latter. He was a beat sergeant before transferring to traffic, where he had served six out of the seven years he was allowed. When he left traffic he was hoping to become a dog handler. He liked dogs, he didn’t like traffic. After six years he thought it was normal to die in a car crash. Addison didn’t think it was healthy to think like that.

  “And your mother,” Clare said, puzzled, “she never said who your father was?”

  “Never,” Addison said.

  SHIRILEY TALKED ABOUT Addison’s father a lot. “Your father,” she would say to Addison, in a way that sounded oddly formal. Bill Addison had been a fighter pilot who after the war had turned his mechanic’s hand to cars, starting with a modest garage on the A1 on the way out of Edinburgh and building to a small empire dotted all around the city. For a brief period—in his self-penned advertising material—he was known as the Car King.

  Occasionally, Bill Addison’s photograph would appear in the paper—a Rotary Club dinner or the opening of a new garage—and Shirley would cut it out and keep it on the kitchen table—where most things were kept—and would brood over it for days before eventually tearing it up in a fit of bitterness and burning it on the fire. In the absence of any real facts from Shirley, Addison developed his own version of his father. A handsome war hero—Addison knew the type from comics—still fighting a war somewhere (despite the Rotary Club dinners) and thus unable to return to his loving wife and son. Addison imagined him high in the clouds, like a god in his chariot, overseeing all his son did. One day he would drive up their street in a golden car (possibly with a crown on his head) and whisk them away to a much better life.

  Addison eavesdropped for additional information, for whenever Shirley’s friend Mary came round in the evening to help Shirley work her way down to the bottom of a bottle of gin, the conversation would inevitably turn to Addison’s paternity. “Ha,” he heard his mother say once, “he came in a fucking shower of gold,” and Mary said, “I hope you made him pay extra,” and they both howled with laughter and choked on their cigarettes and gin. Another time, Mary (who seemed to know his father almost as well as Shirley did) complained that Bill Addison didn’t think he was subject to the same rules as “mere mortals.”

  “Aye,” Shirley agreed, “his sort always gets away with it.”

  THE WEDDING WAS like a school project on a large scale and Clare and her family approached it with an efficiency and economy that would have been sorely coveted by Addison’s chief inspector. Addison was dragged round the stalls of one wedding fair after another by Clare and forced to help her choose “favor baskets” and “color-coordinated balloons” and God knows what other stuff he had never suspected existed. She cut articles from bridal magazines with titles such as “Ways to Panic Proof Your Wedding” and “Ten Things to Consider Before You Say ‘I Do’ ” and Addison had begun to think that the strategic-planning stage would go on forever when suddenly he found himself standing at the altar wondering if she would see sense and jilt him at the last minute.

  It was a church wedding even though Clare was a professed atheist, something she refrained from telling the Church of Scotland minister. There was a fast and furious ceilidh at the reception and Addison was introduced to more Soutars than he thought it was possible for one country to contain.

  Before he knew it, the wedding was over and they were on a plane bound for some Greek island, the name of which Addison had missed. When Addison woke up on the first morning of his honeymoon, he felt completely disoriented, as if he had been on a long journey through space and time and had been dropped back down to earth into another life altogether. A life where an unknown woman was snoring gently next to him in a bed that was on fire with foreign sunlight.

  His own mother had never had a honeymoon or a wedding, never been a bride or a wife. Shirley had been a prostitute. He didn’t tell Clare this, not because he was ashamed, Addison knew no woman walked the streets from anything less than dire necessity, but because he thought it was no one’s business other than Shirley’s. What puzzled Addison, given the nature of his mother’s profession, was why his mother had been so grimly certain about the source of his paternity.

  Only with hindsight did Addison understand the reason for his one and only visit to his father. His mother must have known she was dying and she had been trying to find another home for her only child. When he thought about this it made him feel unbearably sad, not for himself but for his mother.

  ADDISON AND HIS mother caught a bus and traveled to the other side of Edinburgh, where the broad, tree-lined streets and the big houses with their abundant summer gardens seemed to Addison to belong to quite a different city from the one where he lived, in a dark tenement in which you could smell the docks but not see the water.

  His mother had started off the journey in good spirits but was soon in the grip of a fretful anxiety. Shirley’s moods were as changeable as the capital’s weather and she could move from wild elation to spiteful malevolence in the time it took Addison to scurry out into the security of the street, where he would loiter until it seemed safe to go home. By the age of five Addison was adept at loitering.

  After what seemed an eternity to Addison, they finally alighted from the bus. He was disappointed to discover that they hadn’t arrived at their destination and still had an endless walk down several more of those broad, tree-lined streets. Addison wondered who it was that lived amongst this opulence of blossom trees and how his mother could possibly know them.

  It was a Sunday and the air was full of noises that were foreign to Addison’s ears—the soothing rhythm of push-and-pull lawnmowers and the clarion call of church bells. The scents of a Sunday in the suburbs were equally exotic—new-mown grass, lilacs, and the tantalizing aroma of roasting meat. Addison was very hungry. Addison was always hungry. Shirley’s idea of breakfast was a slice hacked off a white loaf, scraped with margarine and sprinkled with sugar. Sometimes she didn’t even remember that, and Addison had to make do with the small bottle of playground milk at school break-time. If Shirley forgot to feed him at the weekend or in the school holidays, then Addison could go hungry all day, although, often as not, one of the women in the street where he lived would throw down to him a jeelie piece or a sixpence for a poke of chips. Addison was called “the poor wee wean” more often than he was ever called Addison.

  This morning a restless, festive mood had led Shirley to buy lardy Aberdeen rolls from the corner shop, but she had rushed Addison to the bus stop before he’d had time to tear off more than one mouthful.

  Addison began to lag behind. The steel tips of his mother’s stiletto heels made a brutish noise on the street. All Shirley’s shoes were the same—sharply pointed at t
he toe and with heels that were precariously, ludicrously high. She was forever staggering and turning her ankle or tripping on cracks in the pavement, and if she wanted to run for the bus she had to take her shoes off and sprint in her stocking feet. When she died, a year later, Addison could remember his mother’s shoes long after he’d forgotten her face.

  Shirley yanked him by the hand. “Come on, Addison,” she said, and Addison heard the tetchy note in her voice that meant it would be best for him to trot along as fast as possible.

  Eventually, they came to a halt in front of a tall wrought-iron gate. Shirley lit a nervous cigarette and alternated between smoking it and chewing her lip while staring at the gate, lost in agitated thought. Addison, had once heard a neighbor refer to his mother as “highly strung” and although he had no idea what that meant he knew it sounded like an uncomfortable thing to be.

  As if she’d come to a decision, Shirley threw the half-smoked cigarette down and ground it into the pavement with the sole of one pointed shoe. She checked her makeup and her hair in her compact mirror and straightened the little jacket she was wearing over her smartest dress—a striped shirtwaister with three-quarter sleeves and a stiff collar that had been fashionable several years before Addison’s birth. Addison always thought of his mother as a young woman and was surprised when many years later he realized that she was forty when she died, only a year younger than Addison was now. She was a drinker, of course, and, although the drink didn’t kill her, it didn’t help to stop the cancer already racing round her body on that summer Sunday morning.

  She snapped the compact shut. “Right,” she said, to herself rather than to Addison. She swung open the wrought-iron gate and walked briskly up the path, her heels striking like flints off the slabs of York stone, but her purposefulness seemed to evaporate when she reached the front door, where she stopped, looking suddenly forlorn, like someone who had been locked out rather than someone who was trying to get in. “Christ, Addison,” she muttered to him as if he were a fellow adult, “I could do with a fucking drink.”