Weekend (29 page)

She wouldn’t join them. She knew the one bravery she must have was the courage not to deny the disastrous consequences of her own cowardice. Having endured the darkness of his life, she wouldn’t light candles to it in his death. She would let in the sun at last.

It was that which split them. Her difference was a constant accusation to them. She embarrassed them. For her the house
was a phoney church where what they seemed to take for incense was the stench of his dead presence.

She stayed until her mother died. It didn’t take long. Perhaps the world was too big for his widow with his overwhelming dominance out of it. The last thing he gave her mother was a kind of terminal flu of the spirit from his absence. Her breath fluttered out apologetically in the bedroom they had shared, where Marion had often wondered whatever happened that was warm.

Her brothers bought out her share of the house with some of the money their mother had divided equally among them. She was glad to let them do it. She felt sorry for them. They would never find more space than he had allowed them. They would die in the prison he had made for them.

Her own escape had come too late to be more than partial, she knew. It was already unlikely that she would fulfil her physicality. But she could perhaps live it by proxy, in her mind. She would people her loneliness.

She went through to the box-room, switched on the light and sat down. She activated the computer and waited. The people on this weekend might not know who she was but she thought she knew who they were. She should do. She had studied them closely enough. They might not have formed any attachment to her but she had formed her own secret attachment to them.

She smiled to herself at the way some of them had kidded her on the bus about her performance at the Free-for-all, calling her ‘dark horse’. Now she suspected she knew why she had done something so unusual. If she had the nerve to do that, she had the nerve to do this.

As she found her way into the file she had prepared for the purpose, she smiled again. A smile as inscrutable as the
Sphinx’s ever was, she felt. The Mouse’s revenge. She made a space and started to type the first sentence but she stopped after the first few words, staring at them. They fascinated her as they appeared suddenly out of nowhere. They were a doorway into cyberspace. They were leading to a place where these people would always be with her, their essences floating helplessly there as if in formaldehyde.

It was that time when

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Patricia Lombardi (not forgetting Dom); Alan and Elaine Gillespie; Colin Beattie and the staff of the Tiree Lodge Hotel (not forgetting Doodan); Frank and Ruby Donnelly; Wendy and Gary Anderson; the two Bettys (Trodden and McCluskey); Bob Cooper;
The Herald
and
Scotland on Sunday
; the woman who bumped into me on a Glasgow street, grabbed my arms and told me that I was ‘a great wee writer’ and that she sent my books all over the world, and then vanished into the throng; Hazel Orme and, assuredly not least, Carole Welch – midwives all but not to be blamed for the baby.

Sphinx

It was an animal committee,

Same question for each candidate.

Failure to get the question right

Involved you in providing lunch.

Oedipus was a vagrant who

Just happened to take the interview.

‘What walks on four legs in the morning

Two legs in the afternoon

Three legs in the evening?’

He commuted the times to a life-span,

Thought of babies and sticks and answered, ‘Man.’

The committee demitted its lofty shelf

And, as it were, dissolved itself.

The job was his, and with him mine

And yours in perpetuity.

But before we pass the cigars around

Consider the question once again.

He didn’t get it right at all.

It was a trick. Yes, babies crawl

But what
walks
is an animal.

Man walks on two legs, let’s agree

But only a mutant walks on three.

The animals knew that pushy man

Was bucking for boss of the whole shebang.

So what did they do? They said, okay.

He wants the job, we’ll fix the pay.

He may become lord of creation

But the pension is his malformation.

He’s not content to be animal?

We’ll make him nothing much at all,

Neither insect, fish, nor beast, nor fowl,

Content with nothing, health or wealth,

Lord of everything but himself.

When evening comes, he’ll blow the job,

The world, the lot, three-legged slob.

It’s been evening now for quite a while.

No wonder that bloody sphinx could smile.

– Harry Beck