The Glasgow Coma Scale by Neil Stewart Read Free Book Online Page A

ever had when they were classmates. All a ruse. Feigning prurient interest, she’d tried to find out what had happened after they left Glendower Street, but Elena’s only responses had been tirades about patriarchy and power imbalances, in which Angus was heavily implicated, but which could have meant anything. Lynne imagined their bodies colliding as the cab turned a sharp corner, Angus’s hand on Elena’s leg, crawling up beneath the wool skirt. She imagined their constant bullying one-upmanship as flirtation, the only way to halt hostilities being to fuck, and this she visualized in every foul permutation her imagination could conjure. The ways they’d stop each other’s mouths. Going over and over it, she made herself literally ill – sluggish, inattentive, heavy-limbed. Her eyes streamed: summer flu, though she recalled dire convent-school warnings about the dangers of self-pleasure. Self-pleasure! It should have been her, Lynne, arguing through the night with Angus. After Elena returned to Athens – something to do with the economic crisis and a poorly father – Lynne had found reasons to walk through Garnethill, hoping she might spot Angus on the art-school steps, smoking, so she could – what – proposition him again?
    Into this, months later, had come Raymond, sidling in beside her at the church on the Trongate one Sunday when she’d felt especially abject. Sick of her own company, her contorted fantasizing, she had accepted his amateurish advances with relief – too readily, it seemed to her now. It was rare to encounter anyone made more nervous than herself by the cat’s cradle of early romance. And here was a man who seemed gentle, who seemed earnest, whose job as building-society branch manager seemed appealingly uncomplicated; who, without acknowledging how much turmoil she must have seemed to be in, had taken it upon himself to try and make her feel better.
    ‘I do, but I don’t.’ Well, here was proof that
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didn’t stop generating smart-alec suggestions, even half a decade on. ‘You,’ she might have told Angus, unflappable, ‘need to work a bit more on your chat-up technique.’ She could have alluded to that retort now, reminding him; and lightly, without animosity, mention her regrets. What a laugh they’d have then about their younger selves, those two freaks.
    It was all good and well, Angus thought, this blether, but you couldn’t help feeling that the chat was yawing constantly towards one inescapable nexus, a rowboat dragged towards a whirlpool at sea . . .
    He’d missed the opportunity to claim total amnesia and he was running out of ways to forestall a conversation he sensed could only end badly. No remark was innocent here, no enquiry unfreighted with unspoken baggage. Nothing had changed; back then, Lynne’s ‘Stay the night’ had been code for a much deeper involvement, whereas for Angus, sex after a night’s pleasurable drinking and bantering was like a digestif: hardly essential, but a nice way to round off the evening. Nothing lost. That the memory still seemed to possess Lynne was sad – was too much. She had imprinted on him like a duckling.
    His best tactic was to distract her. ‘Who’s the girl in the picture?’ he sprang on her as she served up store-bought cake for pudding.
    ‘Oh – you mean Siri?’
    Miss S. McKenzie, thought Angus, immoderately pleased with his earlier feat of deduction. ‘You tell me.’
    ‘Raymond’s daughter – from a previous marriage. She was thirteen when I first met Raymond, so I’ve seen her grow up. She wasn’t very nice to me at first, but we’ve been close these last couple of years, really close, more than her father and me, maybe. Well, that’s probably definite now,’ she laughed uncomfortably. She went to refill her glass at the tap. She had not, to his relief, tried to serve wine with dinner tonight, though he sensed she’d taken his line about white-wine hangovers as covering up