The Blade Artist (12 page)

June catches his eye and approaches. Franco would have raised a hand to stop her advance, had he anticipated that she would wrap her meaty arms around him. — Our laddie, Frank . . . she wails miserably, — our bonnie wee beautiful laddie . . .

Franco looks over her shoulder, focusing on the stonework outside the Chapel of Rest. The stink of fags from June is so profound that no perfume could even begin to cover it up. If he had still been drinking, the effects of last night’s alcohol would quite possibly make him retch. — Aye, it’s a sair one, right enough, he says through gritted teeth. — Scuse me a sec, and he pulls her clinging arms from him. Fortunately Michael, wearing a charcoal-grey suit, has appeared and June fastens onto her second son, announcing in a high bleat, — MIGH-EY-KEL . . .

This gives Franco the opportunity to slip back over to Terry. The cab-driving scud-merchant is chatting to a
well-dressed woman who raises a flirty eyebrow at him. But as Franco approaches them, he hears a familiar voice rasp in his ear, — Ye should’ve got in touch!

Larry looks pretty much the same, maybe pared down a little with age. It interests him in a morbid way, how the passing years chunk up some, while reducing others. — Larry, Franco acknowledges.

— Ah kent Sean well, Frank. Larry moves in close and drops his voice. — Tried tae keep a wee eye on him. Steer him right, he mutters, blinking a little under Franco’s unwavering gaze. — But eh goat in wi Anton Miller n that crowd. Larry is now whispering, as his eyes swivel round to scan the attendees. — Notice
he’s
no here the day tae pey his respects, but, ay.

Franco wouldn’t have known Anton Miller from any of the young men present, but it is good to have his absence confirmed. There are certainly enough of them. Some steal reverential glances at him; others offer cocky half-sneers, as if they fancy their chances. A year in London, five more in California, and another world has grown up in his absence. Or perhaps an oddly familiar one, merely staffed by different personnel.

— So while yir here, consider anything ah huv at yir disposal, Larry says, with ponderous formality. — Ye want tae borrow the van, any time, it’s yours. Ye need a place tae stey, yir welcome at mine.

— Cheers, Larry, Franco notes, still scanning the crowd, — but ah’m fine at ma sister’s.

Michael stands a little apart from the groups, chatting with another young guy, flinty-eyed and with a fistful of
sovereign rings. Franco sees them staring at the young woman, Frances Flanagan. But she doesn’t notice, as she is gazing at him and Larry. Larry turns and winks at Frances, beckoning her over.

— Frances here kent Sean tae, Larry informs him as she joins them, — ay, doll?

— Aye. Sorry like, she says to Franco. He concedes the girl’s beauty. A long, angular jaw gives her a sharpness and intensity perfectly congruent with her piercing eyes and their unusually arresting emerald green.

— Heard ye were there at the time.

Frances looks at him as if he’d just told her that she is standing in a field full of landmines. Frank Begbie can almost see a speeded-up movie playing in those expressive eyes. — Well, ah wis and ah wisnae . . . she says sheepishly.

According to Fat Tyrone, though not known to the police, she had been with Sean when he was in the room, wasted on a cocktail of drugs so formidable it might well have destroyed him had his adversary not got there first. It seemed likely, as she explains to Franco, that she had woken up, after passing out with Sean, to find him dead in a spillage of blood, the door of the flat unlocked. She had understandably got the fuck out, then called the ambulance. — We should talk aboot this later, Frances says, aware of the proximity of Larry’s rapacious gaze.

Franco sees the sense in that, but his brain is buzzing. Was her story true? Or did she know the killer and was protecting him, or was scared of him? Was it her? A lovers’ tiff over drugs or money? She’s slight and slender, but Sean
was so wasted, as the cop, Notman, had said, he’d have been easy enough to finish off. — Aye, he agrees, — we should.

— Right, she nods. Franco watches her depart, joining two other young women. She certainly is a good-looking girl. In the USA she would have perhaps taken the Greyhound bus to West Hollywood, done some waitressing jobs while she took acting classes and waited to be discovered or married. He thinks of young women like her whom he’s known, and what a strange currency feminine beauty back here could be. Many women were thankful that they had it, but were then determined to spend it as quickly as possible. It was more often treated like any other windfall, something to be pissed away before anybody else got their hands on it. Here, Frances would drink and drug her looks into a haggard mess. Despair seemed to cling to her. Then, he supposed, looking around the crowd, most men did the same with their own pleasing youthful features, and he was beset with a sudden awareness that it was only prison that had stopped him from peeving himself into a jakey mess. People led tough lives; they worked, were tired, often depressed, and didn’t have the time or money for spas or gyms or sensible diets. Over her shoulder, he gets a glimpse of Tyrone, with Franco’s old friend Nelly. A few feet away he hears a woman say something about the place being full of ‘hooks, crooks, hoors and comic singers’. That seemed about right.

June is suddenly back at his side, pointing to the chapel. — We huv tae go in.

The service tells Frank nothing about his dead son. The minister’s speech is all bland platitudes. Yet some draw obvious
relief and comfort; June’s soft wails break out in gentle intervals, through the fug of her medication, flanked as she is by him and Michael. Throughout the proceedings, his second son’s lower lip sags, his eyes tarnished in sullen suspicion. Michael never looks at him, and Franco concedes to himself that he can hardly blame him, given how their last meeting had played out. Otherwise, there are plenty of old faces. Some are genuine friends, like Mickey and boys from the boxing club; others, many of whom he’s crossed over the years, seem basically along for a thinly disguised gloat.

As well as June and Michael he has Elspeth, Greg and Olivia sharing the front pew with him. Joe sits behind them, looking bedraggled, pished and spoiling for a fight. The only alleviation from the minister’s dreary recitations comes from the Tesco phone; it suddenly explodes into a hurdy-gurdy ringtone, compelling Franco to answer it. — Aye?

— Are you paying too much interest on your loans? a robot voice enquires. Franco snaps it off, June looking at him in her old-school wounded way. Then it’s time for everybody to leave. He sees Kate, another of his exes, who looks well, with her two sons, Chris, about fourteen, and River, around twelve, who is his own. More than any of Franco’s offspring, the kid, whom he’s never seen outside some infant pictures she’d sent him in prison, looks disconcertingly like him. He shakes the boy’s hand, asks him about school, tells him to work hard at it, and be good to his mum. It’s about all he can run to, and he’s relieved to be interrupted by his old neighbour, Stevie Duncan, and his wife Julie. He hasn’t seen them for years, and is delighted to hear that Stevie’s mum,
old Mrs Duncan, is still alive and living in the sheltered housing complex at Gordon Court. It is the same one his grandad Jock died in. He recalls that she’d knitted him his first ever green-and-white Hibs scarf. They are good people. — She would have been along, Frank, Stevie tells him, as they file outside into the cold. — It’s her legs, she cannae stand about for long.

— That’s a shame. Ah’d love tae pop up and see her.

— She’d like that, Frank.

The funeral is followed by a reception in a hotel on Leith Links. People come up to him, many of them barely recognisable as old acquaintances. Gavin Temperley has ballooned. — Pittin oan the Coral, Gav, Franco observes playfully.

— Good livin, Temperley smiles back with a faintly suppressed air of desperation.

Then another voice in his ear, hesitant and cagey. — Awright, Franco . . .

He turns to see a thin and haggard man, with a greasy mop of sandy-grey hair, under which sit two large dark eyes with a dull sheen, set far back into a face of ghostly pallor. — Awright . . . Franco warily responds. — How’s it gaun?

— Ye see it aw, Franco.

Spud Murphy looks so old and wizened to him that if he hadn’t spoken Franco wouldn’t have been able to confirm his identity. — Cannae be as bad as that, surely!

A gallows smile pushes Spud’s features into some kind of animation. Then they tumble south again. — Sorry aboot Sean. It’s a bad toon, Franco. Aw changed. A bad toon now, likesay, Spud warns.

Franco nods, as that couldn’t really be disputed. All towns have their bad sides; this one is no worse or better than any other. In California, they lived only a few miles away from where a film director’s privileged son had recently gone on a rampage, shooting people dead because he couldn’t get his hole.
Thank fuck they don’t have guns here
, he thinks mischievously, looking at poor Spud. Despite its movie representation, militaristic foreign policy and creeping racism, he finds America generally such a mannered place compared to here, but then they let lunatics buy guns, and that could change everything.

Over Spud’s shoulder, he can see June, still tearful, being comforted by Olivia, with Michael looking on, seeming almost nonchalant. Franco feels a strange reverberation coming from deep inside him.
Breathe . . .

One . . . two . . . three . . . who are we . . .

To think that this was once his family, and these were once his bosom buddies. He contemplates Mel and Grace and Eve, trying to isolate details of their faces as they slither through his mind, their friends Ralph and Juan, and even his in-laws and his agent, Martin, back in the sun of California. And they call this grey place Sunny Leith. It was bizarre. Life often seemed like a meaningless joke. You either got the custard pie in the face, or you got to giggle at those who did. — Right enough, Spud, Franco almost bellows, fighting back a gurgling laugh.

As the drinks kick in, so the procession of old lags from all over town sidling up to him, full of conspiratorial talk in jailbird whispers, grows exponentially. The inanities and the
exhortations to violence, most regarding vengeance against Anton Miller, are almost overwhelming. He feels the bleakness crawling into his skull. Franco breathes in steadily, trying to tune it all out. That pressure on your brain. Eroding focus. Diverting the flow of thought down old, ruinous neural canals. He is thinking of his heads of actors, and specific mutilations on them. Of his canvases, those attic versions of Dorian Gray, drenched in blood red. He keeps his eye on Frances Flanagan, and is almost pleased when Elspeth and Greg come over to rescue him. — There’s a boy from the local paper here, a crime reporter, Elspeth informs him.

— Disgusting that they won’t leave a family alone to grieve, Greg muses, looking at the reporter, ruddy of face and grubby of dress, who stands alone in a corner. Then he turns to a group of youths, who have been stealing glances at Franco.

Frank Begbie has registered this too, deciding that at least some of them had to be mobbed up with Anton Miller. He might not be here but he would still see everything that went on. — Aye, he agrees.

— Hmm. Greg takes another glimpse at the young team. — Do you think there’s a danger that you might be seen as a hero by some young kids around here?

Franco gives a matter-of-fact shake of his shoulders. — I
am
a hero to some young kids around here, he says, pausing to look at Elspeth. — I was a hero to my son and I was never there for him. Now he’s in a grave at twenty-one. And I’ll no be here for anybody else’s son either.

Greg sees his wife’s eyebrows arch towards the ceiling in dismay.

Terry is chatting to some members of the young team. Franco watches as he jokes easily with them, all the time drawing their girlfriends into the conversation, eliciting giggles as he then ignores the boys. The young team are keeping away from Tyrone, who stands at the bar, a brooding vengeful aspect hanging around his big shoulders like a cloak. And he is with Nelly, Franco’s old buddy, who studiously avoids him. He is about to go over and say hello, and perhaps offer some kind of apology to Tyrone, when suddenly Larry is back in his face. — So, Franco, what’s changed about Scotland, then?

— Cunts still have bad teeth, drink too much, take too many drugs . . . he looks over at Tyrone, — they’ve got fatter. That’s what’s changed.

Larry’s face creases in a grin. — Like they’ve no goat fat cunts in the States? It was thaim that started aw this fat-cunt shite!

— Aye, it’s a global problem now, Franco smiles, noting that one thing about Larry was that people avoided him. Elspeth and Greg, for example, who have sloped off across the room. He has his uses.

— Too right, Larry argues. — They say three hundred million Chinkies are obese these days. That’s nearly mair obese Chinkies than Americans ay aw sizes. That means a lot ay shite grub’s gittin scranned. Ye dinnae git that wey on a handfay ay rice!

— Heard
Chinese Democracy
?

— Thaire’s nae democracy in China.

— Naw, it’s an album, Guns n’ Roses.

— Nup.

— Check it oot. Comes highly recommended.

— Right . . . So how’s life in California then, Frank?

Frank Begbie looks over at a couple of old adversaries. One is Cha Morrison from Lochend, who originated from the stair next to the one June now lives in. With a fistful of sovies closing round a beer glass, he looks like the cat that got the cream. It is, he reflects, something of a result for Cha; he gets to laugh at Sean’s demise while drinking the booze his father, a long-term rival, has paid for. — Been enjoying it, but there’s something missing, he considers. — Like a war.

— Funny wee temperature in this room, Larry acknowledges.

Frank Begbie remembers that Larry was once a victim of Cha Morrison’s blade; his assailant did time for it. He feels his pulse starting to race. He makes himself breathe slowly and evenly, in through his nose, out through his mouth.
Even. Stay even
. The best time to hit somebody is when they are drawing in a breath.