Peter May - The Chessmen

I was never one to seek escape in drink or drugs, but I did my fair share of drinking, and smoked more than my fair share of joints. My problem was one of lassitude. I just couldn’t bring myself to care. About anything.

It was late winter, around February or March. We had played a gig somewhere on the south side of the city, and had been invited afterwards to a party in one of those huge, red-sandstone mansions in Pollokshields. It sat up proud at the top of a sprawling garden, surrounded by chestnut trees, black and stark in their winter nakedness. A corner site in a gushet that must have occupied a couple of acres.

An enormous conservatory with elaborate curving roofs had been built on to the back of the house to contain an indoor swimming pool. The house itself was tastefully furnished. Thick-piled woollen carpets, signed prints on the walls, antique furniture. Hugely expensive crystal and china ornaments lined shelves and were displayed in cabinets. It was not the ideal playground for fifty or sixty young people high on dope and drink, and intent on having a good time.

Mairead and Roddy, it appeared, had finally broken up for good, and Roddy was there with his new girlfriend, a beautiful blonde-haired girl called Caitlin. This was her parents’ house, and they were away on holiday. Self-appointed guardian in their place was Caitlin’s brother, Jimbo, an unpleasant young man with a designer haircut and a single ring in his ear. He appeared to have several girls on hand, and was strutting about the house in his Gucci shoes and Armani suit as if he owned the place.

A great deal of alcohol was being consumed, and by one or two in the morning almost everyone was skinny-dipping in the pool, spilling champagne and shrieking to be heard above the brain-splitting blast of the sound system.

I was tired and fed up and couldn’t be bothered with any of it. I sat in the main lounge, sprawled on the settee, a can of beer in my hand, watching a video on the biggest TV screen I had ever seen. I say watching, but I don’t think I was, really. I have no recollection now of what was playing. A movie maybe, or music videos. Bubblegum for the eyes. And the brain.

At first I was barely aware of someone sitting down beside me. Until I felt the warmth of a thigh pressed against mine, and a scent so familiar it was almost comforting. I turned my head to find Mairead smiling at me, a smile that might once have quickened my pulse. But I was used to it by now, and didn’t trust it.

‘What you doing in here on your own?’ she said.

I shrugged. ‘Wishing I was somewhere else.’ But it felt good to be speaking just Gaelic again.

‘Snap.’

I raised an eyebrow. ‘You don’t have to be here. You can get a taxi home any time you like. I’ve got people relying on me for a lift back.’

Even although I had got over her by this time, I think I was still in awe of her beauty. Her dark hair was cropped, as it had been since the accident on the Road to Nowhere, and she had developed into a striking-looking woman. The soft features of the teenage girl were hardening into something more adult, but no less beautiful. She had lost weight and her eyes seemed larger, even more compelling.

She was still in her stage gear, a full-length black dress that hugged a pencil-thin figure and plunged from shoulder straps into a deep V between her breasts, an extraordinary contrast with her porcelain-white Celtic skin. It would be fair to say that she looked stunning.

‘What if I asked you to take me home?’

I eyed her suspiciously. ‘Why would you do that?’

‘Maybe because I don’t want to go home alone.’

When I said nothing her smile widened.

‘Remember that time you gave me a lift back to Stornoway on your crappy old moped?’

I was surprised she even remembered it. ‘Yeh, we got soaked.’

‘And my bum was bruised for days after in the shape of your luggage rack.’

I laughed out loud. ‘You’re kidding!’

‘I’d have shown you, only you might have got the wrong idea. Roddy always kept a blanket folded on his. Yours was raw metal tubing. It was bloody agony. All the way back.’

‘And here was me thinking it was passion that made you hold on to me that tight.’

There was mischief in her eyes. ‘Maybe it was.’

‘Yeh, right.’

Her arm was draped over the top of the settee behind me now, and her fingers were playing absently with my curls. It made me uncomfortable. She said, ‘You used to fancy me Fin, didn’t you?’

‘Used to.’

‘But not any more?’

I just shrugged.

‘What happened?’

I turned to meet her gaze. ‘I got to know you, Mairead.’

It was like a light went out in her eyes, and all the animation left her face. She took her arm away from the back of the settee and sat forward on the edge of the seat, hands clasped in her lap. I couldn’t see her face now. ‘I think that’s just about the most hurtful thing anyone’s ever said to me.’ There was the slightest tremor in her voice.

I had a sick, hollow feeling inside me. I hadn’t meant to hurt her, and yet it was a kind of payback for all those years of frustrated teenage fantasy when she had taken pleasure, or so I thought, in exploiting my weakness. And I wondered suddenly if it had all simply been a figment of my own imagination.

‘No one knows me,’ she said. ‘Not really.’

‘Whistler thought he did. He told me once you were really insecure. And trying to be something you weren’t.’

She turned surprised eyes on me, then. And I saw the tracks of silent tears shining on her cheeks. But I still didn’t know whether to trust them. ‘Whistler said that?’

‘He was in love with you, Mairead. Probably still is. I always figured that’s why he never came to Glasgow. Removing himself from the source of the pain.’

A distant look washed momentarily across her face, then she focused on me again. ‘Take me home, Fin. Please.’

I don’t think anyone noticed us leaving. But I saw Mairead’s backward glance through open French windows into the conservatory, where Roddy was frolicking naked in the pool with Caitlin. I didn’t much care about how the others got home. They could all afford to get taxis by now. And I was feeling bad about what I’d said to Mairead. It’s one thing to think it, quite another to say it out loud and carelessly inflict pain.

We drove in silence through the dark, overhead lights reflecting in wet streets, passing in an endless succession through tenemental south-side suburbia and on to Paisley Road West. Mairead had bought a penthouse flat in a restored Victorian drapery warehouse built into the triangle of a junction between two roads. On the apex of the triangle, at its most easterly point, stood the sculpture of a golden angel that looked back towards the city. The apartment block was called the Angel Building, and I had always thought that Mairead could not have lived anywhere more apposite.

She didn’t bother turning on any lights in the flat. Windows all along each side of it let in the city nightlight, casting deep shadows around the sitting room. At the opposite end from an open-plan kitchen a door led through to her bedroom.

‘I’ll just get changed,’ she said. ‘Help yourself to something to drink.’ Her heels clicked across polished wood floors, and she pushed the door open. Beyond the bed, from a large, arched window facing east, I could see the city spread out below. But I didn’t move. Wasn’t interested in a drink. She turned back, silhouetted against the city behind her, and stood looking at me in the dark for what felt like an inordinate length of time. Then she raised her hand to slip the straps from each of her shoulders, and her black dress fell to the floor in a whisper of silk. She was completely naked.