Tony Black - Long Time Dead

She turned in the chair, fiddled with her watch strap. She searched herself for a new topic of conversation. ‘I, er, met your friend, Amy.’

I flung back my head. ‘Christ, is she here too?’

‘She was in bits last night… thought she’d lost you.’

‘Oh, bollocks… I’m sorry if you felt awkward.’

She stood up, smoothed out the creases in her jeans with the flats of her hands. ‘No, Gus… not at all.’

‘You sure?’

‘She seems lovely… You deserve a break. I hope she makes you happy.’

‘She does.’

Debs’s face hardened, her eyes thinned. I wondered if she ever played over all those conversations where we’d come to the conclusion that we could never make each other happy. No matter what we said or did, or how hard we tried… it just wasn’t in us. As I stared at Debs now, I understood we were never meant to be. We had spent so long together, but it had all been for nothing. We were never fitted as people. I hoped we could both take the lessons we had learned and move on.

‘I’m glad, Gus…’ Debs picked up her bag from the floor, slipped the strap over her shoulder. ‘I’m going to go now.’

I didn’t know what to say, went with, ‘Okay.’

‘You’ll be all right now?’

It was her way of asking if we were ‘good’. Had we drawn a line under things once and for all. I believed we had. It was hard to admit it, but I knew it. I’d seen her now, spoken to her, and understood where she was at in her mind. Now was time for a fresh start.

‘I’ll be fine… And you?’

She smiled. ‘I’ll be fine too.’

As Debs left the room it was like a part of me left with her; I no longer felt the need to go over the old times. The ground was covered. We’d parted, and we’d parted on good terms. I was happy about that. For the first time in longer than I could remember, I was happy about something.

When the door opened again, Hod, Mac and Amy came in. Amy rushed to my side and put her arms around me. Her long hair fell on my face, then she jerked back her head and stared at me. Her eyes were red and swollen but she seemed to have collected herself now. I was glad to see her.

‘Oh, Gus… you daft prick.’

I smiled. ‘Stop that… it only hurts when I laugh, y’know.’

‘What the fuck happened to you?’ said Mac. He took his hands out of his jacket pockets, weighed them in the air.

‘Take a wild guess,’ I said.

Hod answered: ‘He got rubber and ended up in a ruck… Was on the pish again, after all his warnings of late.’

I sliced the air with my arm. ‘Only half right, smart-arse!’ I motioned Amy to sit on the bed. ‘This was Shaky’s doing.’

‘You saw Shaky?’ said Mac. ‘And you’re in one piece?’

‘Aye, impressive, eh.’

‘What’s going on, Gus?’ asked Hod.

I filled them in on the deal I’d struck with Shaky, on the mental pug in the trackie who was desperate to take a shot at me, and on one or two other things that I’d learned recently from Stevo and Fitz. Things were hotting up. If we didn’t find Ben’s killer soon, I seriously feared there would be another death. Maybe mine.

‘It’s fucking madness,’ said Hod. ‘I can hardly get my head around it.’

Amy placed a hand on her hip, butted in. ‘It’s this city all over. Jesus, you should see some of the brats on my course: they think they’re entitled to lord it over the rest of us… probably always have done. It’s just utter fantasy.’

Hod wasn’t impressed. ‘You’re saying it’s just deluded kids? Those wee bastards are feral.’

‘Those arseholes like Ben Laird got carried away with it all,’ I said. ‘It’s a boys’ gang, silly wee boys playing silly wee games… but they took it too far.’

Mac was listening with his chin in his fingers. ‘You’re forgetting the drugs… they were tanning all kinds of shit. And the Laird boy was dealing… See, when a fair whack of poppy starts coming in, and yer off yer heid on something or other, it’s easy to lose it.’

We had them sussed. But this was a group that was protected, in high places. The Craft was watching over them; and not one of them wanted to see old wounds reopened.

‘There’s a way forward from here,’ I said. ‘But we need to get moving.’

Hod laughed. ‘We… moving. You’re not including yerself in that, are you?’

‘Oh aye.’

Amy slapped her hips. ‘Gus, you’re going nowhere. You nearly died, or have you forgotten that?’

I started to take my clothes out of the cabinet by the bed.

‘Gus, did you hear the lassie?’ said Mac. ‘Yer no’ going anywhere.’

I grabbed the bundle of neatly folded clothes. They were caked in dried claret. ‘Well, I’m gonna need some new gear before I go, that’s for sure.’

I WAS DOING OKAY ON the wobbly pins; my knees felt loose, but then so did my ankles. Between them they seemed to work at keeping me upright. My main concern was the craving for alcohol. The hair of the dog that bit me. I needed to down some sauce soon or the shakes would be back. The hallucinations had stayed away; it would take a good few days of no intake before they kicked in. But I knew they were in the post.

I was determined to make a go of things with Amy. Christ knows why she had stood by me, but she had; I’d be an idiot to question that. In a strange sort of way, now that I had seen Debs, it was like I was given a free run at some happiness. If I had that feeling in me, life couldn’t be all bad. Well, could it?

I turned down Leith Walk. Some wanky arts events had kicked off in a couple of the bars, some Student Grant types were hanging about in rugby shirts and ripped jeans. A few of them had on chunky basketball boots, and to a man they had the customary three to four inches of undercrackers on display. Throw in the foppy hairstyles and they were an accident waiting to happen down this end of the town. Hardmen with Staffies go looking for this type of action. Finding it in their own manor was like all their Christmases come at once.

I sloped passed the yaw-yawing mob, kept myself moving. Much as I despised their ilk – they got my goat, plain and simple – I’d come to feel for the parents of the brats. Ben Laird had been a piece of work, no question. He’d graduated from dabbling in drugs to dealing them, and more besides. Pimping out girls to his well-off buddies must have made him popular, but the boy had been out of control. Add that to the mix of teenage arrogance, and the hothousing of ego that went on in that moronic good old boys’ group of his, and the lad was knocking on trouble’s door. I had my suspicions that the very public coming out of his mother with Tina could have pushed him over the top. Dropping the ‘Bender’ Ben tag smacked of oversensitivity. One thing the lad needed to get straight from the off was, the world he was moving in had no place for sensitivity.

I took a turn off the Walk at Robbie’s Bar, headed down to Easter Road. This part of the East End attracts some numbers on the weekend, match day, but the rest of the week it’s dead at the far end.

The tenements are falling apart down here. In Edinburgh scaf-folding multiplies in the summer months as roofers and the council conspire to squeeze even more out of the hard-pressed townsfolk. But round here, the roof could be in before a stick of scaffold was seen. Some yuppie flats had been stuck up by a foreign firm that didn’t know the postcode was unattractive: I’d been watching the prices drop steadily on their adverts, wondering when they’d be giving them away.

As I turned for the caff I caught sight of Fitz’s Lexus. I’d arranged to meet him to go over what we had turned up on the case so far. He was parking up over the road; I left him to get on with it, went in and ordered up some coffees. For the first time in months I felt like food: all my appetites seemed to be returning. I took that as a good sign – so long as the main one could be held in check.