William McIlvanney - Laidlaw

‘She is an adult person, Mr Lawson.’

‘Is she hell! She’s eighteen. Ah’ll tell her when she’s an adult. That’s the trouble nooadays. Auld men before their feythers. Ah stand for nothin’ like that in ma hoose. Noo whit the hell are yese goin’ to do aboot this?’

Laidlaw said nothing.

‘Oh aye. Ah might’ve known. It’s because it’s me, isn’t it? Ye wid jump soon enough if it wis somebody else.’

Laidlaw was shaking his head. His compassion was getting exhausted.

‘Ah refuse tae be victimised. Ah want some action. D’ye hear me? Ah want something done.’ His voice was rising. ‘That’s the trouble wi’ the whole bloody world. Naebody bothers.’

‘Here!’ Laidlaw said. His hand was up. The traffic stopped. Laidlaw was leaning across the desk towards him. ‘I’m a policeman, Mr Lawson. Not a greaseproof poke. You put your philosophy of life on a postcard and post it anywhere you like. But don’t give it to me.’

Laidlaw’s silence was a confrontation.

‘Look,’ Laidlaw said. ‘I can understand your worry. But you’ll have to live with it for the moment. She may well be back home this morning. I think you should go home and wait.’

Bud Lawson stood up. He turned the wrong way in his attempt to find the door. For a second he looked oddly vulnerable and Laidlaw thought he saw through the cleft of his indecision another person flicker behind his toughness. He remembered his own foetal fragility of some minutes ago. A tortoise needs its shell because its flesh is so soft. And he felt sorry for him.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you out of this place.’ He had torn the page off his pad, still had it in his hand. ‘It’s like doing a crossword just getting out of here.’

At the door Laidlaw remembered that Bob had a Production on his desk — a labelled cassette to be produced soon as evidence in a case. He locked the office and put the key above the door.

Bud Lawson let himself be led. They went down the three flights of stairs. As they passed the desk, Laidlaw was aware of the sergeant looking at him, but he didn’t look back. In the street, the morning was fresh. It should be a nice day.

‘Look, Mr Lawson.’ Laidlaw touched his arm. ‘Don’t rush to any conclusions. Let’s wait and see. Maybe you should concentrate on helping your wife just now. She must be out of her mind with worry.’

‘Huh!’ Bud Lawson said and walked across to his 70 Triumph, a mastodon in a football-scarf.

Laidlaw was tempted to shout him back and put it another way, say with his hands on his lapels. But he let it pass. He thought of what he had seen inside Bud Lawson’s armour-plating. It was as if he had met him for the first time. He shouldn’t spoil the acquaintance. He breathed the absence of exhausts and factory-smoke, and went back in.

At the desk the sergeant said, ‘Nothing, Jack? Well, you asked for it. I could have dealt with it. I hope you don’t mind me asking. But why do you sometimes want to deal with whatever comes up?’

‘When you lose touch with the front line, Bert, you’re dead,’ Laidlaw said.

‘You think you have?’

Laidlaw said nothing. He was leaning on the desk writing on his slip of paper when Milligan came in, a barn door on legs. He was affecting a hairy look these days, to show he was liberal. It made his greying head look larger than life, like a public monument. Laidlaw remembered not to like him. Lately, he had been a focus for much of Laidlaw’s doubt about what he was doing. Being forcibly associated with Milligan, Laidlaw had been wondering if it was possible to be a policeman and not be a fascist. He contracted carefully, putting a railing round himself and hoping Milligan would just pass. But Milligan was not to be avoided. His mood was a crowd.

‘What A Morning!’ Milligan was saying. ‘What! A! Morning! Makes me feel like Saint George. I could give that dragon a terrible laying-on. Lead me to the neds, God. I’ll do the rest. Did I see Bud Lawson on the road there? What’s he been up to?’

‘His daughter didn’t come home last night.’

‘With him for a father, who can blame her? If she’s anything like him, she’s probably been beating up her boyfriend. And how are things in the North, former colleague? I just popped in from Central in case you need advice.’

Laidlaw went on writing. Milligan put his hand on his shoulder.

‘What’s the matter, Jack? You look as if you’re suffering.’

‘I’ve just had an acute attack of you.’

‘Ah-ha!’ Milligan laughed loftily, astride a bulldozer of wit. ‘I hear an ulcer talking. Look. I’m happy. Any objections?’

‘No. But would you mind taking your maypole somewhere else?’

Milligan was laughing again.

‘Jack! My middle-aged teenager. Sometimes I get a very strong urge to rearrange your face.’

‘You should fight that,’ Laidlaw said, not looking up. ‘It’s called a death-wish.’

He put the piece of paper folded in his inside pocket.

‘Listen. Anything you get on a young girl, let me know.’

‘Personal service, Jack? You feel involved?’

The sergeant was smiling. Laidlaw wasn’t.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know her father.’

His hands, illumined in the lights he passed, rose and fell helplessly on the steering. They were enormous hands that had driven rivets on Clydeside for thirty years. They weren’t used to being helpless. Just now they signalled an anger that, lacking a focus, took in everything. Bud Lawson was angry with Laidlaw, the police, his daughter, his wife, the city itself.

He resented the route by which he was having to go home: along the motorway to the Clyde Tunnel Junction, right into Anniesland, left out Great Western Road. The first part of it reminded him too strongly of what they had done to the city he used to know. Great loops of motorway displaced his past. It was like a man having his guts replaced with plastic tubing. He thought again of the Gorbals, the crowded tenements, the noise, the feeling that if you stretched too far in bed you could scratch your neighbour’s head. To him it felt like a lost happiness. He wished himself back there as if that would put right Jennifer’s absence.

He knew it was serious simply because she wouldn’t have dared to do this to him if she could help it. She knew the rules. Only once before had she tried to break them: the time she was going out with the Catholic. But he had put a stop to that. He hadn’t forgotten and he never forgave. His nature ran on tramlines. It only had one route. If you weren’t on it, you were no part of his life.

It was that inflexibility which trapped him now. In a sense, Jennifer was already lost to him. Even if she came back later today, she had done enough in his terms to destroy her relationship with him. With a kind of brutal sentimentality, he was thinking over past moments when she had still been what he wanted her to be. He remembered her first time at the shore when she was three. She hadn’t liked the sand. She curled her feet away from it and cried. He remembered the Christmas he had bought her a bike. She fell over it getting to a rag-doll Sadie had made for her. He remembered her starting work. He thought of the times he had waited for her to come in at nights.

He had passed the Goodyear Tyre Factory and was among the three-storey grey-stone tenements of Drumchapel. They didn’t feel like home. He stopped, got out and locked the car.

He came in to Sadie at the fire. She was wearing the housecoat out of his sister Maggie’s club catalogue. On her its flowers looked withered. She looked up at him the way she always did, slightly askance, as if he were so big he only left her the edges of any room to sidle in. Her very presence was an apology that irritated him.