‘Maybe some day,’ she said.
‘But let’s try.’
She shook her head. It was too late for exhibitions and speeches and trips to Canada. It was enough that they take care of Anne and manage her illness. Alice said her mother didn’t know the difference any more between the past and the present, and Luke suddenly thought of an American poet he’d loved when he was a student, Wallace Stevens. After the lunch he would go to the bookshop and buy the poems.
‘They’re probably worth a bomb, her pictures,’ Gordon said, checking his phone. Luke said he would stand by whatever decision Alice made about the exhibition. Anne’s work, Anne’s life, would take its own course regardless. And Luke would try to help his mother, just help her to overcome all the pain and the mess of her first life.
He felt the strange, loose spreading of the afternoon that comes after a few beers. He could say something. ‘It’s true. I wasn’t always sure myself what was real and what wasn’t.’
‘When?’
‘Out there. On the last tour of duty.’
‘Why was that?’ Alice asked.
‘Too much gaming,’ he said. ‘Too much Dad.’
‘I buried your father in his Royal Western Fusiliers dress uniform. Red hackle and everything.’
‘It’s over,’ Luke said.
Alice just sat when he left the restaurant. Gordon was off talking to the maître d’ and she could hear him laughing, his present-day-ness, all that, making him free.
BOBBY’S BAR
Maureen thought it was funny to see him after all the letters and everything. Just normal, wearing jeans. ‘Don’t ask me how I get to know these things,’ she said to Alice on the phone, ‘but apparently he was in and out the pubs down the town, the wee Saltcoats pubs, you know, that one by the railway station. This was after he saw you in Glasgow. These pubs: dog rough, if you ask me, but there you go. The men like these pubs on a Friday night. The girl who used to work in the wedding shop in Kilwinning was behind the bar. She says he had an alteration with some of them.’
‘An altercation,’ Alice said.
‘That’s right.’
‘Dear God,’ Alice said. ‘I got a text back from him. He said he was fine and heading home.’
‘You don’t grudge a young man a drink, not after what he’s been through. You would sooner he didn’t get into arguments but there’s no controlling men once they’re together, sure there’s not?
Anyway, he came in here in the afternoon after he’d seen you and before he went to the pub. It was funny to see him wearing jeans after the lovely uniform and everything. I’d only seen your Luke in photographs, you see.’
‘He’s looking thin,’ Alice said.
‘He’s a handsome fellow,’ Maureen replied. ‘Anyway, he knows what he’s about. I said if his gran wasn’t in her flat she’d be down there drying her towels. He went off to see Anne and it was about an hour before I saw her in the corridor, dawdling back with her laundry basket. Quite happy. In a wee world of her own.’
Luke ended up in Bobby’s Bar and at one point was standing beside a girl with platinum hair. She had lilac eyes and false eyelashes and was part of a hen night. She said the colour wasn’t real, it was special contact lenses. He was talking to her and lifting shots off the bar and throwing them back, red shots, one after the other. His vision was blurred. He crooked an arm around the girl and she didn’t care one way or the other. ‘She’s spoken for, by the way,’ her friend said.
‘That’s cool,’ he said. ‘I’m off duty. Everybody’s off duty for ever and that’s it.’
The friend just shook her head. She couldn’t decide if she liked his face or not. He was nice and tall but he seemed like trouble. ‘You’re a bit of a thinker,’ she said. She thought he must’ve been a student before or something like that, the way he had a bottle of Evian in the pocket of his bomber jacket.
‘A thinker,’ she repeated.
‘Oh aye. That’s me. Rudyard Kipling.’
Most of the men at the bar were older than him and they couldn’t be bothered with hen parties. They might put a coin in the pot but they were busy talking to each other and looking up at
the television to see the scores. Luke passed out the Red Cola shots to the girls two at a time. ‘Who’s the one daft enough to be getting married?’
‘A real man, at last,’ the lippy one said. Some of the men at the bar looked round and shook their heads. Luke had been shy as a student but he could remember one day walking to the Andersonian Library with the army leaflets and thinking he might be an officer and women would like it. He had been doing an essay on Thomas Hardy and one night he dreamt he was walking in uniform towards a pile of rags. He couldn’t remember the girl in the book he was reading, or the soldier, but he remembered the feeling of power he had, the sense that a woman had taken off her clothes for him and was nearby.
The girls took pictures.
Shrieked.
Downed shots.
Kelly with the lilac eyes grabbed a handful of money from the pot held by the bride-to-be. ‘Our turn,’ she said, smiling a lipstick smile and squeezing into the bar. Luke wondered what her friend’s wedding would be like and imagined men outside the function suite smoking on the steps. The noise of the fruit machine seemed to infect his sense of things, a robust, well-lighted anxiety in the corner. Maybe he had never been enough of a lad to really connect with the whole platoon. He remembered their fear that something big might never happen.
‘What’s your name?’ the girl said.
‘Captain Campbell.’
‘You’re in the army?’
‘I was, aye.’
‘We could tell.’
‘How come?’
‘There’s lots of squaddies in this town. And you can just tell them by the way they stand.’
‘Right.’
‘Not many drink in here, though.’
He looked at the bottles and the masses of postcards and Celtic memorabilia. ‘My name’s Luke.’
‘Check how you stand up straight. And check out your haircut and all that, the tanned face.’
‘Maybe I went to the Sun Splash.’
‘You kiddin’?’ her friend said, eyes bright. ‘There’s nothing you can tell her about fake tan. And that is not a fake tan you are wearing. Take it from the experts.’
Kelly smiled and handed him a shot of something very sweet and green. ‘Apple Sourz,’ she said and the barmaid put the bottle down on the counter. The barmaid seemed to know the girls at the hen party and the bride especially.
‘Oh, that’s pure disgusting,’ one of them said.
Luke ordered a lager top. The girls left in a flurry of plans and proper nouns, places to go next, battle cries and whispered invitations. The lilac-eyed Kelly stood looking for a second. ‘You’re a honey,’ she said, reaching up to kiss him on the lips. Then her fingernails cascaded goodbye in the air.
‘I think you’re in,’ the guy next to him said, nodding in a pair of paint-spattered overalls. The girl behind the bar was looking over at Luke like she knew him. He drank his pint and tried to ignore the buzz of the fruit machine and the telly. Maybe my grandmother never really knew the people in her life, he thought. Maybe none of us do. We didn’t put in the hours. A man in a Celtic top was holding up the European Cup in several
of the photographs pinned up behind the bar.