The Endings Man (5 page)

It came as a shock to Curle to realise that even Jonah Murray, who’d been there, didn’t understand what being bullied by Brian Todd had meant to him. He’d been thirteen when it began and it had lasted for only eighteen months: too old, it might be natural to assume, to be deeply marked by a suffering that had lasted for such a limited time. When he thought of that assumption, though, he recalled how on two or three occasions, into his twenties, brooding over the memory of Todd had turned into a calculation as to how long that dark cloud had hung physically over his existence and how the answer always brought a reaction of disbelief. Only eighteen months! When he came across one or another popularisation of Einstein, he’d had no difficulty in accepting the idea that time was relative.

One day he’d come home in such despair that he had tried to tell his father, that weak pleasant man, what was going on. It had taken an effort even to begin but his father had seemed to be listening, gathering his son down beside him where he sat slack in the big chair. The story had been painfully hard to put into words for he could not help feeling that the fault was his, and the guilt made him ashamed. He might not have managed at all if it had not been for the protective weight of his father’s arm laid
reassuringly across his shoulder. At last he’d come stumbling to a finish, and sat staring at the picture of his mother that had been brought down from the bedroom. The silence stretched as he waited for a verdict until he wondered if what he had confessed was too shameful to be worth a response; but when he summoned the courage to look up he saw that his father had fallen asleep, mouth open and just then dribbling a first snore.

Around that time, his grandmother had begun to question him as to how often his father came home early from the office, and in a roundabout fashion that soon became insistent and open as to whether or not he had been drinking. He had lied and later would wonder whether something might have been done if he had become her willing spy. As he grew older, however, he encountered other men in the process of falling apart and there didn’t ever seem much chance of stopping any of them. Fortunately, it had taken another eight years before his father went bankrupt so that by the time it happened he was finished with university and no longer dependent.

His life had gone awry when his mother died. Todd had paid him no attention before her death. A shark can detect minute dilutions of blood in the water. The bully smells unhappiness.

And now, aided by Jonah, Todd had come back into his life. Over a couple of weeks, there he was, at a dinner given by an acquaintance, at the theatre, at a private view at the Scottish Gallery.

On the last Tuesday of the month, then, it was no surprise to see him among a group of people drinking wine in a room of the National Library while they waited for the reading to begin.

It didn’t help that his approach was that of an old friend.

‘All prepared? I wouldn’t have the nerve myself.’ His proprietary smile passed from Curle to the librarian who was going to introduce him. ‘I’d rather climb a mountain in a snowstorm than make a speech in public.’

‘You know what happened to Joe Simpson,’ Curle said inconsequentially.

‘Came off the mountain with a broken leg,’ the librarian said. ‘Wrote a book about it. Did a lot of public speaking after that.’

Todd looked at them blankly.
Not
a mountaineer; a conclusion from which Curle drew an obscure satisfaction.

‘I thought you weren’t interested in books.’

‘It’s true I don’t have a lot of time for fiction,’ Todd said. ‘There’s so much else to do. But when Jonah told me you were reading from the latest masterpiece, I couldn’t resist coming along.’ He cast a glance towards the entrance. ‘I thought he’d be here by now. The three of us were at school together,’ he explained to the librarian.

Aware that the librarian, as much as himself, would reserve the term ‘masterpiece’ for a very few books indeed and none of them his, Curle drained the glass of wine he’d been given and reached for another. Five minutes later, Jonah arrived and ten minutes after that was registering mild alarm as he watched Curle put away two more glasses.

It was Curle’s opinion that no one could get drunk on wine. It was true that in the year after their first child was born Liz and he, lacking a babysitter, would get a bottle of wine as a Saturday night treat and get from it a buzz of happiness. But then little Mae died held across his knees and wine lost its power to help him unwind. All the same, five glasses before doing his turn, if he’d thought about it that was hardly professional. When it came to it, though, he read as well as ever, he felt that to be true, and answered
the gently leading questions of the librarian deftly enough. The trouble, such as it was, arrived with the questions from the audience. Even then, it wasn’t that he was drunk, for he wasn’t, not in the slightest. The difficulty was that the wine had taken the edge off the tension he usually felt about performing in public, a tension that typically translated into a feeling of responsive gratitude as he made his connection with the people in front of him. Deprived of that, he suffered the unfamiliar sensation of being bored. ‘At one time, you wrote poetry for some of the small magazines. Do you still write poetry?’ ‘I gave up the sin of committing poetry some time ago.’ Laughter. Why were they laughing? It was no more than the truth. ‘How do you write?’ With great fucking difficulty. But the questioner went on: ‘I mean, are you very disciplined? Do you keep regular hours?’ You could always count on one fucking idiot to ask that. Why did they ask it? Who cared? Were they looking for tips? Climbing Parnassus without tears. Parnassus my arse. How old-fashioned could you get? More like: the beginners’ guide to making a supplementary shilling. To that stock question, he’d a stock answer: giving an honest account of the way he wrote irregularly, afflicted with procrastination, but thinking of the book all the time at the back of his mind. Now, bored with the truth as much as the question, he firmed his jaw and lied in his teeth, ‘I get up at seven, have a coffee, a black coffee,’ nice afterthought, ‘and work through till two o’clock when I break for a plate of soup.’ He thought about saying vegetable soup but lost his nerve, and after that hurried through to the end of his working day without pulling the long bow too far, a trick he left to bigger artists. The librarian asked hopefully if there were no more questions. A hand waved. With dismay, Curle saw that it was attached
to Brian Todd. ‘I was wondering,’ he asked, ‘do you ever base any of your characters on real people?’ He had an effective projection, cushioned on a full lungful of air, without a trace of nerves, with that deeper timbre that gives a man’s voice authority. It wasn’t a voice that would have any difficulty in commanding a room, so why claim he couldn’t speak in public? On automatic pilot, Curle made the usual joke about the law of libel and trotted out the anecdote about how Simenon as a protest had published his autobiography with all the bits left blank to show how many threats he’d had of being sued. When he stopped, the librarian took his chance and it was over, leaving nothing to do but sign a few books.

That finished, he would have made for home but was gathered up by the sociable Jonah and added to a group consisting of Todd and a young man who said something flattering but didn’t take the trouble to introduce himself. The night was cold so they didn’t venture far. As he walked, Curle was struck by desire for Ali Fleming, whom he hadn’t visited in almost a fortnight. The two in front were laughing, the young man beside him said something and he made some sort of reply, all of it blurred by images of her breasts, the curve of her arse, the intricate familiar mystery of her cunt under his hand. Get away as soon as I can, he thought.

In the pub, he tried to buy the drinks, not wanting to stay for a second round, but Todd was before him and brought a pint with a whisky beside it though he’d asked for a half pint only.

‘Those admirable work habits of yours,’ Jonah said, settling back on the bench and blowing his nose. ‘It’s a wonder you haven’t written ten times as much.’

For some reason as he drank his whisky, it seemed that
the story of Grogan would be a suitable riposte to that. It was the tale of a young man who was a whore for the repartee and had no fear of being interviewed by a Dublin wit. Came the moment when the wit asked was he the front end of an ass, was he the back end of an ass, why then he must be no end of an ass. The audience laughed and any other man would have been discomfited. Not Grogan, however. Taking a pace back he looked the wit up and down before responding, Fuck you!

Possibly because he got it slightly muddled in the middle, this story did not go down as well as Curle might have hoped. As he pondered this, the young man appeared with a fresh round, imitating Todd in fetching for the writer, that creative spirit, a whisky as well as a pint, though the others seemed content with just a beer.

As he settled down again, he said to Jonah as if in response to an earlier question, ‘I’ve always worked with books. I started with Thins. I’d left before they went into administration, though.’

‘A good bookshop as bookshops go,’ Jonah said, ‘and as bookshops go, it went.’

‘Nothing stays the same,’ Curle pronounced gloomily.

He tasted the whisky and decided it was crap. Maybe the young guy hadn’t much money. But why buy whisky at all if you weren’t going to buy a malt? He hadn’t asked him to buy a whisky. He watched the young man push a lock of blond hair back and decided that he disliked him a good deal. He’d pushed himself in, a pest, an intruder, a nuisance, an irrelevance. While coming to this conclusion, following the habit of a child trained never to leave his plate uncleared, he finished the whisky and started on his pint to take the taste away.

Todd, who’d been sitting with the young man also in his
sights, suddenly said, ‘I was talking to a client from St Andrews about his tax return. He told me there was a biologist in the University there studying flies.’

‘Fruit flies,’ Jonah said, encyclopaedic as ever. ‘Use them for genetics.’

‘No. Ordinary flies, dance flies he called them, out in the fields. Know what they found? They found that males that tried to bribe females with insects didn’t do any better than ones that offered them bits of twig. And they got a grant to do it!’ He laughed. ‘To prove that women are stupid!’

And then two voices spoke at once.

Jonah said, ‘Or that men are bastards!’

And the young man turned to Curle with a wide white smile. ‘I imagine Ali would have something to say to that!’

As Curle recognised Bobbie Haskell ‘from the fourth floor’, Ali Fleming’s upstairs neighbour, he stood up so abruptly that he bumped the glass carried by a man passing behind his chair. Not stopping to apologise, or make the customary placatory offer to buy him another one, he fled.

‘Never mix the grape and the barley,’ Jonah said, buttoning up his coat against the searching wind.

‘What are you following me out for?’ Curle asked ungraciously. ‘Stay and finish your drink.’

He began to walk down the hill towards Princes Street. Why hadn’t he recognised the bloody man? That night in Ali’s flat he’d done his best to ignore him, of course. Not a face or personality you’d remember.

‘Was it something he said?’ Jonah asked, catching up.

‘Who?’

‘It looked like he said something that upset you. Who was he anyway? I didn’t catch his name.’

‘I thought you were the one who’d come across him somewhere and invited him to join us.’

‘Not me. I thought you knew him.’

‘No,’ Curle said, trying to put the whole absurdity of the idea into one word.

‘Maybe Todd knew him.’

The possibility horrified Curle. ‘No,’ he said again. ‘I’m sure he didn’t.’

‘A Velcro man then,’ Jonah said. ‘One of those people that come along and stick to you. Never mind, if Todd didn’t know him before, now’s his chance.’ He gave a little snort of laughter.

Curle grunted. Oddly enough, what he was missing at that moment was the chance to talk over what had happened. If it had been anything else, Jonah and he would have been going along with their heads together, weighing, assessing, teasing it out, more often than not processing it into gossip or joking about its possibilities for the making of fiction. He was a private man but not a particularly self-contained one. The keeping of a secret didn’t come naturally to him, and more and more recently he had found the need to conceal his relations with Ali Fleming somehow chilling, like a shadow unexpectedly cast across spontaneity. A shadow cast over small as much as large things, like now when Jonah was assuming they were both on their way home. Should he go home?

They began to walk along Princes Street, the Castle looming on their left above shadowy spaces of grass and trees. When they were almost at the west end of the street, Jonah said, ‘There’s a taxi. You take it. I’ll get the next one.’

There were plenty of them about, the city was generous with its licences, and Curle flagged down the first one.

He gave his address and waved to Jonah who, nearly at the corner, could hardly miss noticing if the taxi didn’t turn left into Lothian Road. The opposite direction, as it happened, to that in which Ali Fleming’s apartment lay. Jonah, in his turn, would be crossing Princes Street and going back the way they’d come.

Curle sat back in the seat and watched the shopfronts go by. All he had to do was let the cab take him home. He leaned forward and tapped on the glass. What was it Wilde had said? I can resist everything but temptation.

From the beginning, this visit was different. He was surprised after climbing the stairs to see Ali waiting in her doorway to greet him. It seemed she had been roused out
of bed for she was in a pyjama top and shorts and her feet were bare. She smiled at him, ‘I needed cheering up tonight.’ He could smell the muskiness of her body warm from the blankets. As he went in past her, the bedroom was on his left. He turned right into the front room. There was a scatter of magazines on the couch and a bottle of whisky and a glass on the low table. In the grate, the artificial coals of the unlit gas fire piled in lumps of black and grey.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked following him. ‘It’s cold in here. I was feeling lousy so I had a whisky and an early night. I’ve been in bed since eight o’clock.’

He no longer knew why he had come. After a moment, she sat in a chair and gathered her feet under her.

‘Aren’t you going to take your coat off?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘You’ll be hot in bed.’ As he stood abstracted, her smile flickered and faded.

‘It’s no good,’ he said. ‘It’s no good any more.’

‘Do I have a say in this?’

‘It’s no good for you.’

‘And you’re only thinking of me. Of course you are.’ She looked down at her hands in her lap. ‘Would you like me to beg?’

‘You’ve too much pride for that.’

‘What did I ever do or say that gave you that idea?’

He made a chopping gesture of impatience. ‘Don’t tell me I’m the only one in your life.’

‘How many are there? Have I always had someone? All the time you’ve known me? If you thought that, why did you never say?’

Had he always believed she had other lovers? Not always. Perhaps lately. He shrugged. Men are cowards, they
always say they’ll phone. Where had he heard that?

‘I could have written you a letter,’ he said. ‘But you deserve more than that.’

Her laugh took him by surprise. He had heard her laugh before, at one time very often, but it had never sounded like this.

‘A letter? You must be joking. If you go, you’ve taken care to leave nothing behind.’

‘I won’t be back,’ he said. ‘I’ve taken up enough of your life.’

All the way down the stairs, he expected to hear her door opening, her voice calling after him.

The night had turned colder. It wasn’t true that you couldn’t be alone in a city. The pavement ahead of him was deserted. He needed a taxi to take him home. He turned up his collar against the wind. Last winter on a night as cold as this, he had been about to cross the Meadows with Liz, when a young man had begun to walk alongside them. He was wearing an anorak, trainers, no gloves on his hands. He spoke in a low confidential tone, not coaxing, or wheedling, just describing how he lived and that he would be sleeping rough that night. The three of them walked side by side with the dark expanses of grass on either side, and Curle waited for the boy, for he didn’t seem much more than a boy, to ask them for money. It occurred to him that if he could get at his wallet, he could extract a note by feel and even be sure that it was a pound and not twenty for he ranked his money so that he wouldn’t make a mistake of that kind. He could fold it in his hand and simply pass it over to the boy as they parted, saving him the awkwardness of having to ask, for it seemed to him that the boy was hungry for company almost more than anything. When they came to the end of the path, however,
the boy wished them a good night and turned away. It happened quickly, but not so quickly that Curle couldn’t have said, here’s something for you; but by then it would have meant taking out his wallet and he was too cautious for that. Afterwards naturally he was ashamed, but what good was that?

Head huddled into his collar, Curle made his way up the hill under the burden of his guilt, which was real however self-indulgent.