Craig Robertson - Random

I released the lock, the red light disappeared and he opened the door. It slammed shut and I watched the back of the black leather jacket as its wearer slipped into the close without once looking back.

I was raging and out of pocket but something deep inside my dead soul found it funny. A runner had just taken me for a mug and I’d let him. The hard man had decided he’d get a free ride home and that I could do nothing about it. He thought I was nothing and maybe he was right. He thought I was no one. A nobody.

I laughed quietly to myself as I put the taxi back into gear and drove slowly out of that street in search of the motorway. I wasn’t a nobody. I was somebody that they hadn’t heard of yet.

I’d killed. Carr and Hutchison. More would follow. I was going to be known. And yet here was some gallus bastard with the bare-faced cheek to leave me without a fare. I laughed.

It happened. Door lock was supposed to stop it but you weren’t always ready. Money is coming out of the pocket, handle is released and before you know it they are out the suicide door and off into traffic with your money in their hand. Comes with the territory. But there is no way they’d have had the nerve to try it if they knew what I was capable of. There wouldn’t even be a bare hire if they knew that. There’d be a tip every time.

Life used to have a rhythm. Maybe it still did but while it used to be a constant, understandable, workable, bearable thing now it wasn’t. Hadn’t been for six years. If there was a new rhythm then it wasn’t one I could live with. It jarred. It messed with my head. Clanging noises fucking with my ears and my mind. Even though it was now supposed to be dancing to my tune, it still rang raw and rattling and upsetting.

A long time six years. Where there had been order there was discord. Like Thatcher lying before television cameras, whimpering about harmony as she bastardized the words of St Francis of Assisi yet whipped up more conflict than ever before. What was the norm had quickly become something very different and much worse.

I knew it was the same for her, my wife, but that didn’t make it any easier for me to accept the way she chose to deal with it. Each to their own is all very well but she was way off the mark. Wrong.

It was her rhythm, her solution. But wrong just the same. She filled her days with her campaign; using it to shut out everything else, blot out the world. She would leaflet, she would petition, she would persuade and harangue. She would sit on committees and chair discussion groups. She would carry placards and stand outside Parliament. She was on first-name terms with MPs, MSPs and councillors.

Every fucking minute of it a complete waste of time.

She complained, she moaned, she whined. She grumbled, criticized and bleated. She had achieved absolutely nothing and would achieve absolutely nothing. After all, the one thing that she really wanted to accomplish was impossible.

That morning was just typical of it. It was just after seven and I was slumped over the breakfast table, drowning in a mug of coffee and sinking lower after a long night shift. She had charged into the kitchen, her hair tied back, businesslike. Just a few stray strands of the fair hair that had caught my eye all those years ago managed to escape the clutches of the hairband. She had a waterproof on over a suit jacket. Ready for all weathers and all circumstances.

She had aged maybe fifteen years in the past six. Lines where there had been none. Her green eyes deeper and darker. Her mouth set harder. I think she was smaller too. Not that she had ever been much over five foot but I think it had all beaten her down another half inch.

Not that morning though. She was ready for the day. She was bustling around the house full of the joys of a day ahead, believing all the false promises that it held. She even sang a bit. I caught her humming a few bars of something under her breath, a rarity in our house these days. I bridled at it. Half-witted optimism was not something likely to cheer me up after a long night at the wheel. Glasgow had been enough for me without this too.

I knew I was supposed to ask where she was going, I knew I didn’t care and I knew she would tell me anyway. I just stared into the murky depths of the coffee and stayed silent.

‘Going to the Scottish Parliament today,’ she breezed at me eventually. ‘Train through to Edinburgh then to Holyrood.’

I gave her just a nod in response. Any more would have signalled interest, even encouragement. Any less might have kicked off another row.

She looked back at me for a bit longer. More in hope than anticipation I was sure. Something in her eyes made me cave.

‘What’s happening there?’

She brightened. She enthused. ‘A protest outside the main entrance. Should be a couple of dozen of us and I’m really hopeful there will be press coverage. Maybe television too. BBC Scotland didn’t say they’d definitely be there but it is in their diary. Fingers crossed.’

Uh huh. Fingers crossed right enough. Couple of dozen meant there would be five or six. Hopeful meant very unlikely. In their diary meant no fucking chance. We had been there so many times before.

With that, she swept up whatever it was she felt she needed and deposited them in a selection of bags and pockets. A last mouthful of tea was knocked back in an exaggerated haste and the cup placed down with the hurried air of a woman on a mission.

A last look round, a wave of her hand as if she didn’t even have time to speak, and she was out and off to catch the eight o’clock train to Edinburgh. I watched the door bang shut and could only shake my head at the shudder that was left behind. It wasn’t just the eight-hour shift that had left me tired.

I tried to listen to her footsteps as they faded away, tried to capture the final, faint smack of heel on concrete, strained to hear the very last sound that I could. With each wilting, softening step I spiralled into sleep until my head was on the table and my mind had drifted to another time, another place.

I sat like that for an hour before waking sore and stiff and dragging myself off to a cold bed for a further four uneasy hours of sleep. As ever, slumber offered no escape from a waking nightmare. It just brought memories and distorted versions of an already disturbed reality. I’d long since given up any hope of finding some sanctuary with my eyes shut.

It was nearly five before she returned, as deflated and self-righteous as I’d expected. She dropped her bags and coat as if throwing off armour. The weary warrior returned from the front.

The same dance as the morning. I was to ask how it had gone. I didn’t care. She would tell me anyway. The truth was found between the lines. She had stood in the rain outside the Parliament for three hours along with eight other well-intentioned, misguided halfwits. Every one of them holding a sign and wasting their time. This wasn’t how it was told to me.

Few MSPs even noticed the dripping bodies littering the entrance to their talking shop and those that did paid little attention. Eventually one made a token gesture and invited three of them in out of the rain for a cup of tea and a five-minute head-nodding session. A cursory chat forgotten as soon as they were back on the Royal Mile.

Suitably patronized, the would-be revolutionaries had trotted off again, overflowing with self-praise and having achieved the square root of fuck all. Oh how pleased with themselves they were on the train back to Glasgow. Making notes, eating sandwiches and taking it in turn to pat each other on the back.

Nor was that the end of her day of busy non-achievement. In the afternoon, she was back in Glasgow pushing for a meeting with members of the education committee. I hated to think what they made of her. Probably filed under nutter or nuisance.